This is part of a weekly series on AI and free speech.

If you follow politics, you’ve probably seen an ad made with AI — and if you live in an area with a contested midterm race, you’ve probably seen several.

The Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district featured an ad depicting the incumbent, Thomas Massie, in an AI-generated throuple with congressional progressives, while an ad from Massie allies showed his rival Ed Gallrein abandoning President Trump in a hail of bullets. “Trump was in the foxhole,” the narrator says. “Woke Eddie Gallrein tucked his tail and ran.”

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In Georgia, gubernatorial underdog candidate Brad Raffensperger created an AI caricature of his opponents dueling with pugil sticks to mock their ugly brawl to lead the polls — a battle that has itself been waged with AI ads.

And in Texas, the most controversial ad of the cycle put Senate candidate James Talarico in a dress, singing an AI-crafted rendition of The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things,” with repurposed lyrics to have Talarico singing that some of his favorite things include “changing the gender of all your offspring.”

The Talarico ad drew condemnation from across the political spectrum, part of a larger backlash against the use of AI to create unauthorized, highly realistic depictions of people in an unflattering light. These concerns have fueled a wide array of legislation aimed at curbing their spread.

At the milder end are disclosure regimes like Kentucky’s, an example of the approach most states have taken: The law lets a candidate sue to block an ad that lacks a “clear and conspicuous” AI disclaimer, like the throuple ad above. At the harsher end are criminal bans. Texas passed the nation’s first in 2019, criminalizing deepfake videos published within 30 days of an election with intent to influence the election. Minnesota’s version reaches back 90 days, and a 2024 amendment added a remarkable penalty: A candidate convicted of sharing a deepfake forfeits their nomination or office.

Some proposals reach broader than elections. The NO FAKES Act, which recently advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimous support, would offer a right to seek damages over an unauthorized digital replica of one’s likeness. The bill’s “one-pager” summary points to some of the biggest examples that have inspired worry about deepfakes: an AI-generated version of Tom Hanks used for “advertisements for a dental plan that he never appeared in,” for one example, and a principal at a Baltimore, Maryland, high school “framed as a racist by an AI-generated recording of his voice,” for another. The bill promises to cover both.

But proposals targeting deepfakes also sweep in the protected use of AI depictions for news, commentary, and, notably, parodies of public figures and elected officials. And at core, that’s what the depiction of Massie in a throuple, the pugil dueling Georgia candidates, and Talarico in a dress are — parodies recalling classic themes and motifs of political cartoons and lampoons going back to the American founding. This is expression at the apex of First Amendment protection. And as courts have started sorting through anti-deepfake laws — with provisions being ruled unconstitutional in Texas, California, and Hawaii — they’ve reached the same conclusion, deeming anti-deepfake laws to be threats to traditionally protected expression in a new form. Those early returns should give legislatures pause and encourage them to contemplate the scope of what they’re restricting.

An old tradition

In November 1968, The Los Angeles Times published a cartoon by Paul Conrad caricaturing then-Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty’s reported desire to be newly elected Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense. The cartoon depicts an ignorant Yorty eagerly awaiting what he presumes is his imminent escort to the White House, but is actually a group of orderlies with a straitjacket.

Yorty sued the newspaper, claiming the quotation attached made readers think Yorty was claiming he had been appointed secretary of defense, and, generally, arguing that the cartoon made readers believe he “was insane and should be placed in a straight jacket.” Yorty’s claim was easily dismissed. As the California appellate court emphasized on appeal: “No reasonable person would interpret the cartoon as a report that Mayor Yorty had actually made the statement shown in the caption or that he was in fact mentally deranged or insane.”

The court rightfully pointed to a long and cherished tradition in human society of depicting adversaries saying and doing things they never said or did. This extends from primitive ridicule unearthed in artifacts from antiquity to political cartoons that date to Benjamin Franklin’s savaging of the British empire at the time of the American founding. Perhaps most famous is Thomas Nast’s brilliant mockery of New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine during the 19th century, depicting Boss Tweed as a vulture feeding on the city, often with incriminating captions under his likeness.

The fabricated quotations and disparaging depictions were the lifeblood of these cartoons, but they, along with parody and satire broadly, still received the highest degree of protection under the First Amendment. This was decisively affirmed in 1988 when the Supreme Court protected a Hustler parody interview depicting Jerry Falwell in a drunken tryst with his own mother in an outhouse — elaborated upon through words Falwell obviously never spoke. The Court grounded the unanimous holding in the proud tradition preceding it: “graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate … our political discourse would have been considerably poorer without them.”

A good portion of the AI-generated content currently generating controversy — including many political ads — fits comfortably within this tradition. They place a recognizable public figure in an exaggerated or implausible scenario to ridicule a perceived trait, position, or failing. The fabricated image and words are used as a vehicle to emphasize an underlying political criticism. That is the heartland territory of satire (the use of exaggeration, irony, or invented scenarios to engage in political or social critique) and parody (imitation directed at the person, work, or style being imitated, usually for purposes of criticism or ridicule).

But they look real!

But, you might ask, aren’t the fake quotes and actions in an AI-generated “deepfake” delivered through a photorealistic depiction of a person? An AI depiction of a political opponent is inherently more believable than, say, a cartoon, which is clearly a fake depiction. Shouldn’t that change the analysis?

This argument runs into a few problems. First, realism has never been a disqualifying factor for satire to receive protection. If you look at the Falwell parody, for example, his quotes are presented in what at face value looks like a perfectly realistic sponsored interview, formatted like the real ad campaign it spoofed, with a real photo of Falwell to boot.

The Supreme Court held the fake ad was still unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. That’s because readers are let in on the fabrication by numerous pieces of context revealing the satirical intent and nature of the content. The level of realism is just one lens to evaluate.

That’s important. In the cartoon context, the cartoons alone don’t imply a quotation is faked — plenty of caricatures have been paired with real quotations. Thomas Nast’s satirical intent was revealed by the cartoon medium in addition to the exaggerated characters, distinct symbols, and political themes. For the Falwell parody, the obvious tell is the absurdity of the language.

So too does the AI-assisted Talarico ad leave plenty of contextual tells revealing its satirical nature: the cartoonish dress, the outrageous lyrics, the over-the-top delivery. And for a reasonable Kentuckian, it’s obvious that Massie is not in an intimate relationship with members of the squad and that his opponent Ed Gallrein has not actually been in a war with Trump. Again, those ads are just the latest iterations in an American tradition of disparaging depictions using satire to persuade people politically, only enhanced by the capabilities of new technology.

But it’d be a mistake to view deepfakes as novel — or the issues raised by them insurmountable. Audiences have been recalibrating to realistic fabrications for nearly as long as there have been images to fabricate. This also extends to the election context. In 1950, Maryland Senator Millard Tydings was defeated after a tabloid circulated a spliced photograph placing him in friendly conversation with Communist Party leader Earl Browder — a meeting faked with scissors and paste. In recent decades, Photoshop has put that capability in digital form on every desktop. It’s produced famous deceptions and parodies, like John Kerry’s fabricated rally with Jane Fonda that caused a stir in the 2004 election, the doctored image of Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden shaking hands submitted as a joke to a 2007 photoshop contest, and the 2008 depiction of Obama goofily holding a phone upside down.

While many have feared the effects such digital manipulation would have on society, politics, and our shared sense of reality, people have largely adapted by adopting “that’s photoshopped” as a reflex to any image that intuitively feels not quite right.

The counter is often this: Some people are just really dense. We have to restrict deepfakes for the sake of the idiots among us.

But those fears are even older than Photoshop. Boss Tweed, the story goes, didn’t fear editorials attacking him, as he believed his constituents were illiterate — but he did worry they could be affected by “them damn pictures.” Today’s political commentators now fear an imagined prototypical cable news-watching uncle uncritically believing Talarico is a dedicated theater kid with a penchant for songs about transgender children.

The problem with that is the evidence that deepfakes are making a massive dent in elections is sparse.

What effects are deepfakes having on elections?

Heading into 2024 — a year of national elections across the globe — fears abounded that AI-generated misinformation could be democracy’s breaking point. The World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation as “the most severe short-term global risk the world faces,” singling out AI as the key amplifying factor.

When we got through the year, two sets of researchers combed through the use of AI and the broader literature around it to examine its effects: Princeton’s Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan; and Oxford’s Felix M. Simon and University of Zurich’s Sacha Altay.

Kapoor and Narayanan analyzed every instance of election-related AI content in WIRED’s AI Elections Project, a database that tracked 78 cases of AI use in elections worldwide. The researchers found much of it fairly innocuous — improving campaign materials, translating languages, and anonymous AI avatars used to avoid retribution from authoritarian governments.

And for uses that were deceptive, Kapoor and Narayanan estimated what the same content would have cost without AI, including hiring a Photoshop expert or a video editor. In every case, the answer was “no more than a few hundred dollars.”

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the researchers did not find a massive migration of misinformation to AI formats. The News Literacy Project, for example, documented known 2024 U.S. election misinformation and found “cheap fakes” — miscaptioned photos, jump-cut edits, slowed audio — used seven times more often than AI-generated content. Abroad, the gap ran wider: an Indian fact-checker reviewed an order of magnitude more cheap fakes than deepfakes, and in Bangladesh cheap fakes were more than twenty times as prevalent. Looking at the entire global picture, Meta reported that under one percent of the misinformation its fact-checking partners reviewed worldwide was AI-generated.

So why haven’t deepfakes swallowed the universe of misinformation? Simon and Altay pointed to a University of Vienna paper from 2021, which found that videos derive their evidentiary power not from quality or content but from their source: “An audience may find even the most realistic video evidence unconvincing when it is delivered by a dubious source. At the same time, an audience may find even weak video evidence compelling so long as it is delivered by a trusted source.” In their view, political content is often persuasive because of a trust relationship between source and consumer. And while AI has made it more convenient for trusted sources to produce and share fabricated content, production costs are not a bottleneck for them — it’s already plenty cheap enough to find, share, and create non-AI fabrications with conventional tools.

Outside those trusted sources, the researchers found strong limits to public persuasion — noting findings on the limited boosts to sales from consumer advertising and the minimal impact of repeated exposure to persuasive political content. As they summarized, “research on the limited influence of mass persuasion clashes with the widespread assumption that people are gullible and easily persuaded.” They hypothesize that what is really driving worries about AI-generated content is what they call a “third-person effect,” the fact that we simply perceive “others to be much more susceptible to negative media effects than ourselves.”

The value of AI-generated deepfakes

So if we have reason to believe the impact of deepfakes on political persuasion is limited, why are we seeing politicians use them in the examples we reviewed?

Well, they’re funny. Like political cartoons, people use AI depictions to turn criticism into a joke — using imitation, exaggeration, and ridicule to grab attention for a political point. Courts confronting deepfake regulation have recognized as much, placing AI-driven satire within the “long-held American tradition of ridiculing and criticizing candidates and elected officials.”

But AI’s photorealism does add a certain quality — an effectiveness, even — that isn’t inherent to previous media in this tradition. And I’m not referring to the believability of the underlying “false” depiction. What’s enhanced is the joke. The medium opens up new possibilities for comedy and ridicule through the absurdity of the photorealism. Take this example of an AI-generated video mocking President Trump by depicting him on a romantic escape with Vladimir Putin. It’s funny to people because the public figures look real — even if everyone knows they’re not. The same content would simply have a different appeal and different audience in, say, a hand-drawn medium. That’s because the fact of the depiction so closely resembling the target of the criticism adds a new dimension to the satire that makes otherwise uninteresting content engaging and entertaining, and the ease of using AI tools allows more people to create and engage in the critique facilitated by the medium.

This makes regulation that burdens or restricts the medium especially concerning. As the Yorty court said, political cartoons were particularly important because they were a unique medium for getting across certain critiques and ideas that can’t be made in quite the same way in other mediums. They “communicate in graphic form a statement of editorial opinion which might otherwise require paragraphs of written material to express.” AI’s photorealism similarly offers new opportunities for comedy and critique of politicians and public figures that will gradually reveal themselves as the medium develops — that is, if it’s allowed to develop without landing satirists or campaigns in legal trouble.

Now, I don’t want to pretend the ad putting Talarico in a dress is the Mona Lisa. Admittedly, much of AI-generated content will strike readers as pretty bottom-of-the-barrel — “AI slop,” as it has come to be termed. But as the federal district court in Kohls v. Bonta emphasized, “novel mediums of speech and even low-brow humor have equal entitlement to First Amendment protection.” Whether the content provides genuine social value or not is up to viewers and creators, not the government.

The law already has answers

But what about egregious, plainly deceptive uses of AI-generated content that lack social value and do real damage? A notable example proponents of deepfake legislation point to is an AI-generated Joe Biden robocall from 2024 that encouraged New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the state’s presidential primary.

In many cases, this kind of deception will already be barred under existing law. In the election context, we have laws governing impersonation of a candidate and voter suppression. For reputational harm, certain false or deceptive speech that causes specific, targeted harm to individuals is already punishable under narrowly defined First Amendment exceptions. If, for example, someone creates and distributes a deepfake that is intended to and actually does deceive others into thinking someone did something they didn’t do, the depicted individual could have a claim for defamation or false light.

Existing law’s capabilities in this area aren’t hypothetical. When the perpetrator behind the Biden robocall was revealed to be a Democratic operative hoping to expose the need for new regulation of AI and deepfakes, he was given a wake-up call in the form of a steep federal fine and multiple criminal charges under existing legal frameworks. That kind of threat is taken care of under existing law.

Lawmakers might be tempted to meet us “halfway” by simply requiring a visible disclosure for AI-generated content. But disclosure has issues, too. California’s AB 2839 exempted satire and parody from its restrictions so long as the AI-generated content carried a disclaimer meeting the statute’s formatting requirements — text that, on a phone screen, could swallow the video it labeled. The Kohls court saw the flaw plainly: “a mandatory disclaimer for parody or satire would kill the joke.” Satire works by letting the audience take in the joke on their own terms — through the cartoonish imagery, absurd dialogue, ridiculous premises. A label announcing the fabrication in advance destroys part of what has long endeared audiences to satire. These risks are compounded by the fact that, as FIRE previously warned in comments to the FCC, an AI label “is likely to be interpreted by the public as an admission that the political ad is likely to be false or misleading.”

But again, neither restrictions nor disclosures appear necessary. The current research presents little evidence that the fears about AI-generated content are materializing, or that the medium is proving more formidable at persuasion than the long line of content manipulation tools which preceded it. In fact, the lesson from those tools has been that society is fairly resilient to novel fabrications. And for the rare fabrication that is truly dangerous or damaging, the law already has existing remedies. For the rest — the fake throuples, the imaginary pugil sticks, the digital show tunes — it’s time for lawmakers to get in on the joke.

There are some things you can always count on in life: The sun rising and setting, the tide advancing and retreating, and UK police announcing new investigations of social media posts.

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This time, it’s over an Instagram post from London Assembly member and Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who initially accepted a collaboration request on an Instagram carousel of images from a recent Green Party event. Polanski was tagged as a co-author on the post by another account and approved the tag, bringing the post onto his account and into his followers’ newsfeeds.

What was in the post? How did police respond?

The fifth image in the carousel showed a man at the event wearing a T-shirt depicting artwork of a person operating a guillotine and the text “We’re only making plans for Nigel.” The BBC reports that the words on the shirt “are the same as the lyrics of a 1979 song by band XTC.” A party spokesman said of Polanski’s post, “Once this image was brought to his attention he immediately unshared the post. He unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message.”

The UK’s Reform Party, and its leader Nigel Farage, made the case that the shirt is referencing Farage — and they’ve asked police to intervene. Reform Spokesperson for Home Affairs Zia Yusuf, who argued the image shows “the beheading of Nigel Farage,” said: “This is incitement to murder. It should be treated as such by the police.” He also wrote earlier this week, “If Zack Polanski is not in police custody by this time tomorrow, the Police will have declared open season on Members of Parliament.”

Farage, too, weighed in calling for arrest: “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”

In a statement, Metropolitan Police confirmed they’re looking into it: “Earlier today we received a third-party report relating to an image shared on social media. We take reports of this nature extremely seriously, and officers are conducting inquiries into the matter.”

It’s not clear, though, whether police are looking into Polanski, the Instagram account that originally uploaded the photo, the man pictured wearing the shirt, or some combination of those involved. A freelance photojournalist who took and uploaded the photo said Polanski was not responsible for the image, and that he had reported himself to police to explain the context.

The UK’s uneasy political environment

Tensions around charged political expression are particularly high in the UK right now, given the recent gruesome murder of Ann Widdecombe, a politician and member of the Conservative, Brexit, and Reform Parties over her career. Widdecombe was found in her home earlier this month, bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Prosecutors have since charged a 28-year-old man with murder and terror offenses, and police are still investigating the suspect’s motives.

Politicians and commentators like Reform’s Zia Yusuf have connected the two cases, arguing that the guillotine image is particularly dangerous “just two weeks after our friend Ann was murdered.”

It’s not the only free speech question that has arisen in the aftermath of Widdecombe’s murder. Despite originally saying her posts were not criminal, police arrested University of Aberdeen web developer Heather Herbert for Bluesky posts celebrating Widdecombe’s death. “And some good news for once. I hope it was an extremely painful death. And I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony,” Herbert wrote in a post. And in response to a critic of her comment, she said: “I’m done with being nice to pieces of human garbage like her.”

What does this mean for free speech?

Both these posts — the image of the guillotine and the comments celebrating Widdecombe’s murder — would be protected in the U.S., and the First Amendment has answered these questions before, some quite recently. They remain deeply contentious socially, though.

On the question of the first, the guillotine shirt that says “We’re only making plans for Nigel,” the Supreme Court’s definitive cases addressing true threats and incitement are instructive.

In Watts v. United States (1969), the case centered on an 18-year-old who said at a Vietnam War protest, “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ . . . They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.” The Court, finding that Watts’ speech was protected political hyperbole, explained that advocacy in the political arena “is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.” True threats require that the speaker convey a serious intent to commit violence, not just engage in rough and tumble expression around politics.

Similarly, the Court’s reasoning in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), a First Amendment challenge to a Ku Klux Klan leader’s conviction under an Ohio criminal syndicalism law, lays out its approach to incitement to imminent lawless action. The Court ruled that simply advocating or celebrating violence is protected as long as it’s not intended and likely to provoke immediate unlawful action.

Without more, this T-shirt, whether a reference to Farage is intended or not, would not meet the high bar required for either the true threat or incitement tests in the U.S. — not for Polanski, the person who posted the image, nor the man who wore the shirt.

And regarding the legality of posts commenting on a political figure’s death, the United States is still dealing with the fallout of censorship after the murder of Charlie Kirk last fall, but it’s not a crime to speak ill of the dead. And for good reason. Guidelines around how we discuss the dead are matters we must map out socially, not legally.

Government bodies, including public universities that fired faculty members who posted controversial or critical tweets about Kirk after his killing, are now paying out steep settlements to those same faculty members who sued and raised First Amendment claims. FIRE has also brought two First Amendment lawsuits over protected speech about Kirk, both in Tennessee. FIRE recently secured an $835,000 settlement for retired law enforcement officer Larry Bushart, who was jailed for 37 days after posting a meme on Facebook that quoted President Trump saying, “We have to get over it.” And FIRE’s case on behalf of an Iraq War veteran, fired by a state agency for criticizing Kirk in a Facebook comment, is still ongoing.

But ultimately we’re talking about the censorship battles taking place in the UK, where there is certainly no First Amendment or neutral speech principles to be found. And that’s exactly the problem. The UK has created a turnkey censorship system so expansive and reflexive that officers are encouraged to act as speech police in part because they already have done so, thousands and thousands of times.

Farage said he believes he would be investigated over a similar post, so he wanted to see Polanski receive the speech police treatment. The solution, however, is not a race to the bottom, where police are asked and expected to run a magnifying glass over every X, TikTok, and Instagram post. All that will do is further entrench an already disturbing practice granting officials the power to narrow the boundaries of expression. Indeed, in testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last year, Farage lamented that on “the question of civil liberties, Britain has, unfortunately, now lost her way,” and rightly advocated First Amendment-style protections in the UK.

After dropping the case over comedian Graham Linehan’s tweets last year, Metropolitan Police admitted that officers should not be “policing toxic culture war debates” and that the agency must move away from investigating non-criminal online speech. That’s right. The UK needs to turn away from speech police and toward speech protections. You can’t fix a free speech problem by digging deeper into censorship.

Last summer, a former student journalist asked the University of Michigan’s student paper The Michigan Daily to take down or anonymize an article they had written more than 10 years ago. The article mentioned their involvement in a movement calling for the school to divest from companies associated with the Israeli government. In the email, they explained that their partner was a green card holder, and they were about to travel abroad with their young child. They worried they would not be allowed back.

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As managing editor of the paper at the time, I was dismayed and, frankly, enraged by the fact that any of our journalists felt pressured enough by the political climate to want to self-censor. The former student’s article was about the emotional challenges of transitioning to college. It was a deeply personal and moving piece, and one that other students might greatly benefit from reading — even those who might strongly disagree with their politics. Taking down the author’s name would remove that intimacy and destroy the soul of the piece.

But this was not an isolated case. Far from it. During my time at the paper, the editor-in-chief and I received an unprecedented number of emails from current and former student journalists requesting that they be made anonymous or that their articles be entirely removed from The Daily’s website. Some had graduated years ago but still worried that their pro-Palestinian or anti-Trump essays could draw attention from the administration. Many of them were international students or graduates now on a work visa, living in fear of being sent home because they had voiced a forbidden opinion.

This wasn’t just Michigan either. There’s a disturbing nationwide trend of student journalists making similar requests to avoid deportation or other repercussions for their protected speech. Hofstra University’s The Hofstra Chronicle approved their first anonymity request in four years because the writer, a legal resident of the United States, feared retribution for expressing liberal views. At the University of Florida’s The Independent Florida Alligator, editors described how they repeatedly saw international students who didn’t want to write about politics. Not because they didn’t have anything to say, but out of fear.

This comes in the shadow of the federal government targeting international students — including student journalists — for their speech. Let’s not forget that last year, ICE agents arrested Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, claiming without evidence that she had ties to terrorist activity. But court documents show the real reason was an opinion piece she co-wrote in which she criticized her university’s response to the war in Gaza.

Or the fact that FIRE is currently representing The Stanford Daily in a lawsuit challenging provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration have used to target foreign nationals for pro-Palestinian speech. In the complaint, we explain that several Stanford Daily contributors decided not to publish or asked the newspaper to remove previously published articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to the threat of visa revocation.

The situation is so bad now that a collection of student media groups — including Associated Collegiate Press, the College Media Association, and the Student Press Law Center — even issued an alert advising student publications to ease longstanding takedown and anonymity policies in light of these new risks. This is striking, as journalists have historically exercised caution when granting anonymity to maintain credibility and provide an ethical account of history.

This is, of course, not a critique of anonymous speech. On the contrary, anonymity has served as a tool throughout the history of our nation to protect speakers from the potential consequences of unpopular or dissident speech. In the 1995 Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the Court wrote:

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation — and their ideas from suppression — at the hand of an intolerant society.

In their essay “Anonymous speech is as American as apple pie,” FIRE’s Carrie Robison and Daniel Ortner remind us that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pen name “Publius,” while Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, addressing “the inhabitants of America,” without signing his name.

What is concerning, therefore, is not that student journalists are making use of their constitutional right to anonymity. Rather, it’s the driving force behind the rising frequency of these requests. The government only needs to make examples out of a handful of people — Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Moshen Mahdawi — to create a chilling effect that will cause others to silence or mask their voices rather than let them ring.

I wholeheartedly support the right of student journalists to remain anonymous. But no former student journalist who graduated years ago should have to dig through every article they’ve ever published and reflect on what’s safe to say.

When former University of Pittsburgh student and freelance journalist Henry Bard tried to get records from his campus police department last year, the university swiftly said no.

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Most public universities nationwide fall under their states’ open-records laws, but not Pennsylvania’s — Pitt, Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, and Lincoln University are not legally classified as “state agencies,” but “state-related” institutions. The difference may seem semantic, but the distinction means these four schools, and their campus police departments, are not subject to the state’s Right-to-Know-Law.

That keeps the press and public in the dark. But a new legal challenge to the University of Pittsburgh Police Department’s refusal to provide records could change that.

Into the light

In April 2025, Bard requested records about Pitt PD’s purchase and use of less-lethal munitions during demonstrations at the school’s 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.

Pitt denied the request the same day Bard sent it. The university’s assistant legal counsel specifically cited the state’s RTKL, which “exempts state-related universities such as Pitt from the definition of Commonwealth agencies.”

Bard appealed the denial to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, which upheld Pitt’s decision. With representation from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bard again appealed to a state court, arguing that since Pitt PD operates under governmental control, serves a governmental function, and is under government oversight for financial decisions, it qualifies as a local agency. Pitt PD is the “third-largest law enforcement agency in Allegheny County,” and its officers must maintain state certification, according to Bard’s court filing.

The court held a hearing on June 24, and if it takes up the case, it could bring the university’s police department into the light after decades outside the purview of the state’s transparency law.

Cardinal rule

Public universities should not operate as a black box. Student journalists often serve as watchdogs at their institutions, and public records are vital to their reporting. They rely on public records to help get scoops, vet sources, and confirm facts. Professional reporters and the public also use transparency laws to keep a close eye on state-funded institutions.

In most states, public university police departments are also subject to open-records laws. Even some private university police departments may be subject to such laws depending on the jurisdiction.

Like Bard, Vincent Porco, Editor-in-chief of The Louisville Cardinal, had his own public records fight. Porco ran into a string of redactions and denials to requests made of the University of Louisville in the spring. But after coaching from FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative hotline, he advocated for those records’ release. The university complied, allowing the Cardinal to identify a man who had been banned from campus.

Those kinds of requests improve the quality of journalism and allow for more accountability on public college campuses. But that transparency is lacking at Pitt, Penn State, Temple, and Lincoln.

Shining a light on campus crime

Unlike Porco’s fairly straightforward open records fight, Bard’s has wound its way through the state’s open records office and now to the courtroom. And as we wait for updates on the case, those seeking transparency for Pennsylvania’s state-related universities and their police departments are not without options.

Whether you are seeking campus crime information from one of these state-related institutions or a private university or college, you can take advantage of the Clery Act. The Clery Act requires nearly all colleges and universities — public and private — to maintain a publicly accessible daily crime log that must be updated every 48 hours.

While not as detailed as other public records from other campus police departments, it includes the nature, date, and location of the crime, when it was reported, and the disposition of the complaint. (And student journalists who can’t get this information should contact SPFI.)

Student journalists rely on open records laws to be the watchful eyes on behalf of the public on their campuses, including their campus’s police departments. Transparency is vital to ensure accountability for all public institutions, regardless of what they’re called. The more light shed on these institutions, the brighter the future is for transparency.

In order to teach, Bill Smoot had to leave everything behind. His wallet, cash, credit cards, and chewing gum — everything but his car keys, ID, and course materials.

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From Berkeley, Smoot drove 25 minutes over the bridge to the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he waited by the outer gate with a small group of professors. Then their little procession began, past the first guard, into the main gate, through the sally port with its steel bars and bulletproof Plexiglass, and into the heart of California’s most infamous prison.

Strangely, though, it was, in parts, quite beautiful. Green lawns. A small garden. A chapel. Men tending to rosebushes. It looked less like a state prison than the cloisters of a monastery hidden behind medieval fortifications. But going a bit further on, there emerged the familiar landscape of 20-foot walls, guard towers, rifles, razor wire, and men in blue pacing the yard. Sometimes though, a friendly voice would break the heavy air, “Hey, Smoot!”

By all accounts, the convicts of San Quentin who became Smoot’s students adored him. The feeling was mutual. For 14 years, Smoot kept making the trip back, over the bridge and through the prison’s tediously layered security to return to his students. But these days, he no longer makes the trip. Earlier this year, Mount Tamalpais College fired Smoot after he published a fictional novel about a teacher at San Quentin and a prisoner who finds hope in the classroom before escaping — with the teacher’s help.

Most of the teachers at Mount Tamalpais College, the accredited liberal arts college inside San Quentin, are, like Smoot, volunteers. But even though he wasn’t compensated, Smoot treated the job as if it paid six figures, exploring ideas in literature and philosophy no differently than he had anywhere else over his 50-year career, which spanned from UC Berkeley to the Castilleja School. “One of the keys to teaching effectively in prison,” he says, “is to recognize that it’s not that different.”

This may be the most radical thing Smoot believes about prison education — that it should be like education anywhere else. “They deserve a real college,” he says, adding, “There are already statistics about the recidivism rate of people who take college courses in prison versus those who don’t.” Indeed, multiple studies have found that prison education significantly lowers recidivism.

But for Smoot, education is not valuable only because it produces better outcomes. It also demands intellectual seriousness. A real college must expose students to difficult ideas and honest inquiry, challenging them to grow and be better, even if those ideas may make institutions uncomfortable. What else does academic freedom mean?

This belief was forged long before he began teaching at San Quentin. In 1968, he was editor-in-chief of Purdue University’s The Purdue Exponent, and under his leadership, the paper became involved in reporting on and advocating for the issues of the day, from Vietnam and the civil rights movement to campus protests. But Purdue was a conservative campus. In fact, the entire state of Indiana was conservative. The school administration wanted something closer to a campus showcase; a public relations organ with pinnings, glee clubs, and no front-page evidence that the 1960s had reached the city of West Lafayette.

When Purdue’s president unilaterally removed Smoot as editor, the student staff revolted, and by the following Monday, Smoot announced in what he would call his “Tennis Court Oath edition” that he would continue in the role. Students, faculty, national organizations, and the press rallied. The administration could either send police to seize the newspaper office or back down. It chose the latter. Smoot was victorious. But more than half a century later, he would find himself defending education once more in a remarkably similar fight.

The escape plot

The compromise that ultimately cost Smoot his classroom had nothing to do with his teaching. It had to do with his book, San Quentin Exodus, published in June, about a fictional white suburban prison tutor with a Nancy Drew obsession and a black inmate whose life has gone terribly wrong. The book includes an escape plot, as well as descriptions of the many decent-hearted men Smoot came to know in Mount Tamalpais classrooms during his time there.

“I see men who have done very bad things years ago,” he once wrote, “now trying to make themselves better. Convicted felons take classes, commit themselves to self-help groups, organize peace days on the yard, and walk to raise money for breast cancer care. Those with the necessary clearance fight wildfires.”

Smoot thought prison higher-ups might like the book. After all, it doesn’t trash San Quentin or prisons in general. It doesn’t depict guards as monsters or prison administrators as sadists. Indeed, according to Smoot, the book shows the very thing California officials say they want the newly renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center to represent: rehabilitation. Specifically, “the California model” with its drama workshops, peer mentorship, and life-changing classrooms.

But instead, says Smoot, the escape plot “freaked out” Mount Tamalpais College President Jody Lewen. He had given her an advance copy, and he says she worried that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation might react badly. However, Smoot says he later learned that no one at CDCR had actually read his novel in full. When he spoke to the warden, Chance Andes, Smoots says he seemed to be grasping at reasons to justify the termination, eventually settling on the fact that Smoot hadn’t gotten permission to use “San Quentin” in the title of the book, despite the fact that the prison is a household name and regularly appears throughout popular culture.

Nor is the book a manual for escaping prison. The fictional scenario he describes in his book depends on a highly specific combination of factors that are unlikely to ever align for success: an accomplice obtaining the right UV stamp from a party store, widespread COVID masking that makes identities easier to obscure, and prison staff failing to closely verify the identities of people leaving the facility.

But in Lewen’s email to Smoot announcing the decision to fire him, a different concern becomes clear. “When you first started as a volunteer,” she wrote, “you received that list of institutional rules, as part of a very in-depth, hours-long presentation by me on institutional rules, regulations, and culture.”

Lewen then explained that she has spent the last 25 years trying to convince San Quentin officials, as well as correctional administrators nationwide, that their concerns about such college programs are unwarranted and that, “as college instructors are sufficiently vetted, trained, and supervised, they will not disregard the rules of the institution and undermine anyone’s safety.” But, she told Smoot, his book does exactly that because it used “San Quentin” in the title, “created an actual threat to safety and security,” and “fulfilled the most negative stereotypes of volunteers: not just that they do not understand the rules and regulations of the institution; but that they do not care about them and will flout them at will.” (Lewen did not, however, cite the specific rule or rules in question.)

As a result, she said, while expressing regret at the loss of a beloved teacher, Smoot could not be allowed to continue working at the school. And just like that, San Quentin’s gates closed on one of its best professors. But it would be easy, and wrong, to tell this as the story of a censorious bureaucrat silencing a brave teacher. It isn’t.

Lewen is not the villain one might imagine. Heterodox Academy profiled her as a member of the group who wants to bring heterodox speakers inside so her students can engage with broader societal issues and conversations. She became involved with the school after attending a conference on psychoanalysis, where she ended up sitting next to one of the people who helped found San Quentin’s college program. Soon, Lewen began co-teaching a communications course at the school. “I fell totally in love with it,” she told Heterodox Academy. “These were adults who really wanted to be in college — incredibly diverse intellectually, politically, demographically. Intellectually, it was so stimulating.”

But Mount Tamalpais College’s stated commitments to academic freedom track with a priority to provide expressive rights to its faculty and students by offering the same rights that most other colleges do. Its General Catalog promises to protect “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” Mount Tamalpais proclaims “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed just because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the college community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

These are noble promises. But if Mount Tamalpais wants to be seen as providing a credible college education to the inmates of San Quentin, it must normalize enforcing the principles of academic freedom that undergird that credibility. College professors, after all, are prone to writing books. Sometimes those books are controversial. They might name real places, and they might make administrators sweat. They might write novels with characters who do alarming, illegal, morally complicated things. Faculty’s freedom to do this is part of the fabric of the higher education experience at just about every college in America. If San Quentin wishes to deliver a comparable education within its walls, how can it treat Smoot’s book any differently?

FIRE wrote to Lewen explaining the importance of Smoot’s case for principles of academic freedom at the budding institution, and asking for clarification on the rules he may have broken. If there’s one thing a prison can be counted on to have, it’s a rulebook.

We received no reply.

Prison dreams

During the pandemic, San Quentin shut down educational programming, with no online classes. Smoot missed teaching there so much he began dreaming about it. He pined for his classroom at San Quentin, and in his longing to be back in, he began to build the idea of a tutor who wondered about getting out. The prisoner character emerged from his mind fully formed from years of experience with countless men who fit the description. It came easy. He wrote the first draft in six months.

But the deeper engine for the book was not the mechanics of escape. It was the society of men he discovered in the classroom. In a 2013 essay for Salon, Smoot described assigning Homer to men he feared might dismiss an ancient Greek king as irrelevant to their lives. Instead, he wrote, Odysseus, the man “much turned” and “much turning,” made immediate sense to men whose lives had turned, and been turned, again and again. When Odysseus gazed across the sea and wept for home, the classroom fell silent. From San Quentin, incarcerated men can see San Francisco Bay.

When the class moved from The Odyssey to The Catcher in the Rye, some students initially dismissed Holden Caulfield as a rich kid wasting opportunities they never had. But the book, with its universal concerns about authenticity and self-actualization, eventually got under their skin. Smoot remembers one middle-aged black man serving time for murder quietly realizing out loud, “I’m like this dude.”

A few weeks later, one student returned from a medical appointment, absolutely glowing. He had talked with a nurse about Holden’s obsession with the ducks in Central Park. “She remembered the part about the ducks on the pond,” Smoot recalled him saying. “We talked about that.” This man had stumbled upon one of the greatest gifts of literature — human connection — and Smoot had helped give him that. More than this, Smoot had given the man “a seat at the cultural table.”

But of all his memories there, one of Smoot’s favorites is of an older student from the Mississippi Delta who had never gone to school. For much of his life, the old man had been illiterate. In prison, the chaplain taught him to read, but he never made much use of it. Then he landed in Smoot’s class, where characters in books were discussed and debated the way men in the yard talked about women or sports. Years later, the old man found Smoot crossing the yard one day and his face lit up with pride. He had spoken to his daughter on the phone the night before. He had told her he was reading Shakespeare now.

To understand what San Quentin and Mount Tamalpais lost in firing Smoot, start there. Start with a man who could once barely write his own name, now sharing with his daughter whatever wisdom he learned from the greatest playwright in history. Or think of the student who could talk to a nurse about Holden’s ducks. Or the student who wrote, after taking Smoot’s class, “I had a hunch there was more to my story. Now I know I was right.”

Second acts

To be clear, Smoot has no grudge against Mount Tamalpais College or its leadership. Quite the opposite. He speaks of Lewen’s role in building out the college program and saving it from budget shortfalls with real admiration. He describes with respect how Warden Andes is a hard worker who rose through the ranks from an entry-level correctional officer job. Smoot knows the college’s work matters, and he believes that it is run by people doing their best within a complex system. He knows San Quentin is politically complicated, and that there are people inside and outside the prison who think free college for incarcerated people is outrageous.

But to him, that’s exactly why principle matters, and he hopes the school will reconsider, for the sake of the one thing it exists to serve: its student body. In her email to Smoot, Lewen herself described the decision to fire him as “a huge loss to us and above all to our students, given your tremendous contributions as a teacher and beloved colleague for so many years.”

Gifted and passionate teachers are incredibly hard to find. Even more so those who will devote themselves to prisoners — and for free.

San Quentin has long been a site for reinvention and artistic breakthrough. Merle Haggard was incarcerated there when he saw Johnny Cash perform for the men inside, a concert he later credited with helping turn him toward music. Years earlier, the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco brought Waiting for Godot to the prison, helping inspire the San Quentin Drama Workshop, an early landmark of American prison theatre. And a little over a decade ago, Joyce Carol Oates taught a creative writing class there. Throughout its history, Smoot says, San Quentin has been a place of second acts.

Now, after 14 years, the gates that opened for Smoot twice a week have closed. The clang is familiar. But this time the man on the wrong side of the gate is not trying to break out. He is asking to be let back in.

Last month, Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs (the country, not the American state) established the Division for Combating Hate Speech. The department’s role is to identify offenders and their identities, draft reports of the alleged offense, and pass them along for prosecution. State Minister for Coordination of Law Enforcement Bodies Mamuka Mdinaradze said the group is needed to address “any type of public communication that contains hate speech, incitement of enmity, violation of dignity, and other similar acts.”

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Revisions to the criminal code pushed through by the ruling Georgian Dream party last year, which punish insults to public officials with fines and short prison terms, have given this new division a vast range of political speech to target. And the department has been busy indeed.

In just one month of hunting down alleged “hate speech,” staff forwarded 150 cases to courts for prosecution, even when the target of the speech hadn’t filed a complaint. In yet another victory for the department, presumably one of many more to come, a journalist who insulted politicians on social media was sentenced to prison last week.

Vakho Sanaia, a journalist with Formula TV, wrote a Facebook post in June sarcastically encouraging others not to call Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and Member of Parliament Lado Bozhadze “dicks.” On July 10, the Tbilisi City Court fined Sanaia around $2,300 for the post. Sanaia responded to the ruling with two more comments: “I wrote a post, saying ‘don’t call Papuashvili and Bozhadze d*cks’ [sic] and they fined me ₾6,000. Well, go ahead and call them that, then,” and a joke that the decision meant the court was therefore declaring Papuashvili and Bozhadze “dicks.”

Sanaia soon learned the Division for Combating Hate Speech was pursuing an investigation of these two new posts, and last week he was sentenced to 14 days in prison on top of his original fine.

“After becoming aware of the previous court decision, he published a post that also contained insulting language,” a lawyer representing the Ministry of Internal Affairs said of the decision. “Accordingly, we considered this to be a disregard for the court’s decision and an indication of a willingness to continue engaging in unlawful conduct.”

There are many lessons to learn from Georgia’s continuing descent into censorship, but an especially important one is that this is simply an inherent risk of giving government officials a wider mandate to crack down on “hateful” expression: Authorities may very well take it as an opportunity to punish speech they deem hateful toward . . . authority.

Just remember last year, when President Donald Trump, responding to questions about then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s threat to target “hate speech” for prosecution, suggested Bondi would “go after” journalists because they treat Trump “unfairly” and “hate” him. (“Hate speech,” of course, is quite famously protected under the First Amendment, and Bondi later attempted to walk back her statement.)

Sanaia’s arrest isn’t an outlier in Georgia, and it isn’t even the first time he has personally been charged under this law against insulting politicians. Nor, unfortunately, is his case an outlier globally. In Germany, for example, politicians receive heightened protection against insults under the country’s criminal code, and social media users regularly face prosecution and investigation for online jokes and insults about political figures. One man’s home was even raided after he — and I’m sensing a broader theme here — called a Hamburg minister a “penis.”

In France, a woman was prosecuted for calling President Emmanuel Macron “filth” on Facebook, and in Italy a journalist was fined over tweets joking about Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s height. Around the world, it’s the same: A mocking tweet can land you in hot water, and maybe even behind bars.

Even in the United States, where insulting political figures stands second only to baseball as a national pastime, this right is under attack. That’s why FIRE sued leaders of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement this month after federal agents issued a “WARNING NOTICE” to a man simply for likening the head of ICE to a Nazi over email.

Authorities should not exempt themselves from criticism by the very people whose lives they affect, sometimes in profound ways. Restrictions on insults to public officials fundamentally invert the way free societies should function — and government “hate speech” bodies like the one Georgia just rolled out only deepen authorities’ power to narrow the boundaries of political speech.

A few years ago, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a basic free speech principle: “the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak his mind regardless of whether the government considers his speech sensible and well intentioned or deeply misguided and likely to cause anguish or incalculable grief.”

Yet that principle appears to have been cast aside in the prosecution and conviction of a woman who hurled racial slurs in a public park.

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In April of last year, Shiloh Hendrix was at a playground in a public park in Rochester, Minnesota, with her toddler when an eight-year-old black boy allegedly took an applesauce pouch from her diaper bag. Hendrix allegedly chased after the child, repeatedly calling him “nigger,” before retrieving the pouch.

The incident drew the attention of a bystander, Sharmake Omar, who began recording Hendrix on his phone. In the video, Omar confronts Hendrix about her language. She responds that it’s “none of your fucking business” and begins walking away. Omar, who is also black, then challenges her to repeat the slur. Hendrix turns around and says, “Fuck you, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger.” After the two exchange some more words, the encounter ends with Omar saying, “OK, we’ll see about that, what the internet has to say about you.”

Indeed, the video went viral. But Hendrix faced more than public condemnation (and support). Rochester prosecutors charged her with three counts of disorderly conduct, two of which proceeded to trial. Yesterday, the jury acquitted Hendrix on the count involving the child but convicted her on the count arising from her interaction with Omar. The judge immediately sentenced her to probation, community service, and a $1,000 fine.

Unless the trial record contains some critical fact absent from public reporting, that conviction cannot stand under the First Amendment.

The video merely shows a heated verbal exchange between Hendrix and Omar. No threats. No violence. Nothing beyond words. However much offense they caused, that simply does not justify the government imprisoning, fining, or otherwise punishing the speaker. A public argument does not become a crime because a speaker used a particular word.

The jury reportedly was instructed on the quaint “fighting words” doctrine. Although still technically an exception to the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recently threw cold water on “fighting words,” observing it “has not upheld a conviction under the fighting-words doctrine in 80 years.” That case was 1942’s Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, involving a man who had choice words for a police officer. It’s a good thing the fighting-words exception has been sharply limited and arguably erased by the Court’s subsequent speech-protective decisions. Violent individuals shouldn’t have a veto over what others can say.

Even if the “fighting words” doctrine still has a pulse, it’s very hard to see how it applies to Hendrix’s comments. The doctrine is, at most, confined to a tiny category of face-to-face insults that, under the circumstances, are likely to provoke an immediate violent reaction. But courts have made clear that even the most taboo racial slurs are not fighting words per se. And, as the video shows, Omar solicited Hendrix — who was walking away while carrying her child — to repeat the slur so he could capture it on video and shame her. She did so and then continued walking away. Nothing about the interaction suggests Hendrix’s words were likely to provoke an immediate violent response.

However one feels about what Hendrix said, the proper response to objectionable speech is counterspeech — of which there was plenty after the video went viral — or to simply ignore it or walk away. But allowing imposition of criminal punishment erodes the important limits on the government’s power to police speech. If officials could punish people for speech based on how others might react, there would be no principled stopping point. A pro-Palestinian activist chanting, “From the river to the sea.” An Israel supporter calling that activist a “terrorist sympathizer.” Someone calling a preacher a “bigot” or referring to a transgender woman as a man. All could suddenly face prison time if someone else feels offended or might throw a punch in response.

Chaplinsky itself illustrates the point. The defendant was convicted of an offense in the vein of disorderly conduct for calling a police officer a “God damned racketeer” and a “damned fascist” — speech that today is unquestionably protected. The case is a reminder that determinations about what speech is too emotionally charged or offensive to allow change from person to person and generation to generation. It would be a grave mistake to give those subjective judgments the force of law.

Yes, that means we must sometimes tolerate speech we find repugnant. But that’s the only way to ensure the speech we value remains free.

“There’s nothing you can say, particularly anything that’s mildly interesting or contentious or your viewpoint, that someone somewhere won’t find offensive.”

— Ricky Gervais, comedian and actor, on calls to tone down his controversial comedy.

Meta report finds AI models censor some political criticism

A new report from Meta’s Oversight Board reveals that many popular AI models — including those created by Anthropic, DeepSeek, and OpenAI — are less likely to criticize repressive regimes than freer countries. In some cases, the LLMs used a desire to abide by censorship laws as justification for refusing to generate critical material.

“What a victory it represents for authoritarians to see their repression ripple far beyond their own police and prisons into technology that shapes what people say and understand about them and the world,” Sarah McLaughlin writes. “If we’re not careful to guard against the willful or unintentional influence of foreign censorship laws or practices, the intelligence these models provide may prove artificial indeed.”

FIRE supports challenge to social media warning label law

FIRE, joined by organizations such as the ACLU and EFF, filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to a Colorado social media law. The law would require social media platforms to display a warning to minors that social media is harmful to their health.

“From dime novels and comic books to television, music, and now social media, lawmakers have repeatedly tried to shield children from the supposed menace of the moment,” writes Gill Sperlein. “But the First Amendment does not allow the government to censor or coerce speech in the name of protecting minors.”

Below the fold

• NIL agreements regulate activities that qualify as a form of speech. Congressional bills like the Protect College Sports Act aim to regulate the NIL landscape, but they could potentially limit expression by providing governing bodies broad discretion in regulating conduct. As Amuda Balu argues, NIL regulators have to keep an eye out for First Amendment concerns.

• Until its repeal in 1986, Act 57 made English mandatory in all Hawaiian public and private schools. The law nearly eradicated the Hawaiian language, until activists brought it back. Elyse Everest tells the story.

• Parody is not a statement of fact made with actual malice and is thus protected under the First Amendment. However, FCC pressure to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show — along with other examples — indicates satirical speech is still under fire. Athena Rem takes a closer look at why protecting such speech matters.

• In 1923, the entire cast of Got fun nekome, a play portraying a Jewish family that defined gender and social status norms, was found guilty of obscenity. Some Jewish leaders worried that the film would further antisemitic stereotypes, but Max Friedman argues the mere possibility does not justify eradicating the play in the name of Jewish safety.

• After Major League Baseball players altered their uniforms as a form of protest, the MLB faced significant pressure from government officials to change their rules on uniform alterations. Athena Rem’s latest piece explains how such encroachment holds concerning implications for the speech of private employees.

• Major news networks NBC, ABC, and CNN chose not to broadcast President Donald Trump’s prime-time address on Thursday on their primary platforms. Now, Trump is calling for the networks that did not air his speech to have their licenses revoked, placing pressure on the media organizations.

International

The Trump administration announced it will shorten the duration of visas for foreign journalists from years to 240 days, cutting those for Chinese journalists down to only 90 days. The move prompted China to threaten retaliatory measures against the visas of U.S. journalists and raised serious concerns about press freedom.

Tech

A new bill proposed in California would require California State University and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges to establish procurement standards for GenAI in line with state requirements. Under these requirements, GenAI tools would have to be evaluated to ensure they will not produce “harmful” or “illegal” content, vague definitions that are often based on subjective judgement. In their latest, Michael Hurley and John Coleman warn that the passage of the bill could leave those in higher education without the tools necessary for research and exploration.

In recent years, there has been a significant uptick in copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies. Organizations like Universal Music Group and The New York Times filed massive lawsuits against companies like Anthropic and OpenAI alleging that training AI models on copyrighted lyrics and news articles constitutes theft. AI companies argued for the fair use of these materials to make a new expressive product. Both sides believe that the future of free expression is on their side. Join Tyler Tone for a deep dive into the application of copyright to AI and what exactly its implications are for the First Amendment.

Culture

Podcasts

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, leading originalism and executive power scholars Jed Shugerman and Ilan Wurman break down the historical arguments underlying two of the Court’s most consequential cases this term: Trump v. Barbara (the birthright citizenship case) and Trump v. Slaughter (the presidential removal power case).

Today in history with Sheridan Macy

The Indian government ordered the expulsion of three foreign correspondents after they refused to sign pledges committing them to abide by censorship rules the country had established as part of the state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. The reporters were from London papers The Times and The Daily Telegraph, as well as Newsweek. Earlier in the month, Washington Post journalist Lewis Simons, who had been stationed in the country for three years, was expelled after the newspaper refused to recall him for publishing statements critical of India’s president. The newspaper was then not allowed to send another journalist or continue operating in India. Many of the foreign correspondents stationed in New Delhi were asked to sign the censorship pledges or face expulsion.

Over the course of the state of emergency, more than 200 Indian journalists were arrested and jailed, power was cut to major newspaper offices, and a chief censor was appointed with strict guidelines on what could be published. Many journalists and newspapers protested by publishing blank editorial columns. The Emergency was officially declared in response to threats to national security, including a recent war with Pakistan. However, it was more likely a move to preserve the power of the prime minister in the face of increasing opposition and corruption charges.

By the numbers

Who is trying to punish scholars for their speech?

Drawing upon data from our Scholars Under Fire database, we found some notable trends. The first is that sanction attempts are more likely to come from the right of the scholar’s expression than from the left.

The second is that sanction attempts from the right are more likely to involve off-campus actors, while attempts from the left are more likely to involve on-campus actors.

Almost half of the sanction attempts initiated from the right of the scholar’s expression involve public officials, and about three-quarters involve public officials, activists, and/or members of the general public. On the other hand, 61% of the attempts initiated from the left of the scholar’s expression involve students, and 89% involve students and/or faculty.

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Just like FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, which we explored last week, there are notable trends in the Scholars Under Fire data.

The first is that sanction attempts are more likely to come from the right of the scholar’s expression than from the left.

Almost half (44%) of the sanction attempts initiated from the right of the scholar’s expression involve public officials, and about three-quarters involve public officials, activists, and/or members of the general public. On the other hand, 61% of the attempts initiated from the left of the scholar’s expression involve students, and 89% involve students and/or faculty.

In other words, sanction attempts from the right are more likely to involve off-campus actors, while attempts from the left are more likely to involve on-campus actors.

This is similar to a pattern found in FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database — efforts to deplatform speakers and events that come from the left of the expression typically involve students and faculty, while efforts from the right of the expression typically come from public officials, activists, alumni and/or the general public. Scholar sanction attempts, however, are more likely to be successful than deplatforming attempts — with about three-quarters of the former (1,456 of 1,935) succeeding compared to roughly half of the latter (946 of 2,064).

It’s important to note that a handful of events are responsible for almost 600 of the scholar sanction attempts FIRE has recorded:

• In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, over 100 scholar sanction attempts occurred due to expression regarding Floyd specifically or race more generally. Most of these attempts came from the left of the scholar’s expression.

• The temporary removal of almost 400 books — most of which were authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited by scholars — from the shelves of the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in early 2024 following directives from the Pentagon to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. These attempts came from the right of the scholar’s expression.

• The aforementioned assassination of Kirk at Utah Valley University and the subsequent targeting of scholars for their social media comments about Kirk’s life and death. All of these attempts came from the right of the scholar’s expression.

At the same time, it is alarming that four of these five mass incidents have occurred over the past year and a half and that each one of these involved public officials.

This points to a troubling conclusion. Disputes over scholars’ speech are no longer confined to campus protests, faculty complaints, or calls for administrators to act. Increasingly, public officials are intervening directly — investigating faculty bodies, removing scholarly works, pressuring institutions, and seeking punishment for expression they disfavor.

The political direction of these campaigns matters, and the data should make us skeptical of claims that censorship is the exclusive province of either the left or the right. But the source of the pressure matters, too. When government officials use the power of the state to target scholars or institutions because of their expression, the threat extends beyond any individual controversy. It places academic freedom itself at the mercy of political power.

Universities should not punish scholars simply because their speech provokes outrage, attracts outside pressure, or becomes politically inconvenient. And defenders of free expression should apply that principle consistently — especially when the speaker’s views are unpopular, offensive, or opposed to their own. The Scholars Under Fire data show how often institutions fail that test. The recent surge in government-driven campaigns shows why passing it has become more urgent than ever.

This is part of a weekly series on AI and free speech.

In 1999, a college dropout named Shawn Fanning and his friend Sean Parker released a piece of software called Napster that let strangers swap music files over the internet. Within two years, it had roughly 80 million registered users — one of the fastest adoption curves for any software in history at its time. Within three, it was dead.

It didn’t die alone. There was Aimster. Grokster. Morpheus. Kazaa. An entire business model for mass-market file-sharing was gradually and then quickly wiped out by a string of court cases in the 2000s culminating in a blow at the Supreme Court in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster. The instrument that dealt the blow was copyright law, wielded by record companies fighting for what they saw as their survival in the digital age.

Now, a bigger, more diverse, better-resourced group of copyright-holders has their eyes set on another threat: the generative AI industry.

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A tidal wave

The scale of lawsuits being brought against AI companies — and the names attached to them — has been staggering. In September 2023, the Authors Guild and a collection of authors including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed a class-action lawsuit accusing OpenAI of copyright infringement, seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. The authors alleged that OpenAI “copied Plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration,” then fed those copies into large language models, which used the copyrighted text for “pretraining” in which a massive collection of text teaches the model the relationships between words and other artifacts of language. The complaint called that process, which is the essential basis for building an AI model, “systematic theft on a mass scale.” Like Napster before it, the plaintiffs understood the entire enterprise to be premised on copyright theft.

Other industries followed suit. The next month music giants Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO filed a complaint against Anthropic alleging that the training of AI models on artists’ lyrics constituted theft, and they’ve since filed an additional suit for over $3 billion in potential statutory damages. That December, The New York Times hit OpenAI and Microsoft with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit seeking damages for scraping millions of copyrighted news articles to build a product they said would both “substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.” And in 2025, Disney and Universal Studios brought Hollywood into the fray, suing Midjourney over its image generator, seeking up to $150,000 for every willfully infringed work. The studios called Midjourney’s models a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The wave of lawsuits — almost all of which are still pending — is not simply a story of industries trying to strangle a rival technology or recoup lost revenues. In many ways, traditional creative industries see themselves where the record industry stood in 1999: staring at a technology that could make their business obsolete. Like the internet and all that came with it, AI has the potential to transform how we send and receive content and information. What traditional creative industries’ role will be after that transformation, should it happen, is uncertain. Will people still check news sites, or just ask an AI who has digested the news? Will we read books, or ask an AI for a bespoke book in the style of an author we like? While those questions remain open and debated, it’s only natural that rights-holders find themselves in a defensive posture, looking to ensure their copyrighted works don’t potentially feed the “engines of their own destruction,” as the Authors Guild’s complaint put it.

Both sides believe the stakes are existential for their industries, and each argues the future of expression depends on its theory of copyright prevailing. These lawsuits strike at the heart of what copyright law is for and its role in the creative ecosystem.

So: What is copyright law for?

Copyright is supposed to serve free expression

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” If there’s a lesson from this series so far, it is the extent to which that line transcends boundaries of form and technology. Any and all restrictions on expression must have a strong justification. Copyright law is no exception.

It derives its authority by living alongside the First Amendment in the Constitution. Article I grants Congress the power to secure exclusive rights to authors “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” This premise has not only been seen by courts as aligned with the First Amendment, but intended by the Framers to work at its service. As the Supreme Court wrote in 1985’s Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, copyright was meant to be “the engine of free expression” by providing the “economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.”

Still, there’s a clear tension. The enforcement of copyright inherently requires government policing of expression through the court system to be effective, and much of that expression could be valuable from the standpoint of First Amendment values. Courts and Congress have responded by drawing important limiting principles meant to keep copyright in service of free expression. These “built-in First Amendment accommodations” codified in the Copyright Act of 1976 include the idea-expression distinction, first established in the 1879 Supreme Court case Baker v. Selden. Under that distinction, copyright is limited only to particular instances of expression — a specific movie like Star Wars, for example, or a specific character like Mickey Mouse. By contrast, copyright does not extend to general ideas, facts, principles, and themes — think a scientific theory like general relativity or a fiction trope like enemies-to-lovers. This distinction is intended to keep copyright law from limiting the free flow of information and knowledge.

Another First Amendment accommodation in the Act is the fair use doctrine, which allows unlicensed use of copyrighted material under certain conditions through balancing the rights of authors against the need to advance free expression. Fair use lies at the core of copyright law’s evolution through new technologies and the fight over AI training. We’ll give it a deeper look momentarily.

But first, we can summarize generally that these limiting principles act as important safeguards to protect freedom of speech. When these safeguards fail, copyright can become a tool of speech suppression — and it has a track record as one. Litigants have wielded infringement claims to suppress leaked documents, unflattering footage, and critical commentary. With the digital age, bogus content takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act routinely knock criticism, parody, and journalism offline. This gives free speech advocates a key stake in defending First Amendment safeguards like fair use in copyright law, to make sure the system works as intended and serves free expression rather than censorship.

What is fair use?

Justice Joseph Story provided a rough sketch of the principles of fair use in 1841’s Folsom v. Marsh, making the critical distinction between using copyrighted passages from a book for “fair and reasonable criticism,” and use that would substitute or “supersede the use of the original work.” The defendant had copied extensive portions of a multivolume collection of George Washington’s writings into a shorter competing biography. Story concluded that the new work displaced demand for the original, establishing an early distinction between transformative use and market substitution.

Story’s opinion laid out a brief protocol for distinguishing legitimate use from infringement, one Congress would later codify in Section 107 of the Copyright Act as a four-factor test. Under that now-statutory test, courts weighing a fair use claim are to consider:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Examples that have traditionally supported a finding of fair use include quoting brief portions of a book in a review that comments on it, using clips from a movie or television series for a reaction video to provide criticism or commentary, making personal copies of a work for private consumption, and parody.

One of the best-known parody cases involved 2 Live Crew’s version of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” — the center of 1994’s Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the fact 2 Live Crew sold its parody commercially didn’t prevent it from being a fair use.

More importantly, Campbell reshaped the first factor of the fair use inquiry by emphasizing whether the challenged use was “transformative.” The Court asked whether the defendant used the copyrighted work for a new purpose or character — adding new expression, meaning, or message — or instead merely “supersede[d] the objects” of the original by functioning as a substitute for it, like Upham’s George Washington biography. That framework would become especially important as courts confronted technologies that required copying to enable uses copyright law had never previously considered.

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Fair use and new technology

An early and consequential example of fair use confronting emerging technologies was the Supreme Court’s consideration of the VCR in 1984’s Sony v. Universal. Hollywood argued the VCR was an infringement machine, allowing people to keep personal copies of the entirety of any content aired on television. The Supreme Court disagreed, noting users were simply using the technology to view content they had been invited to freely view, but on their own schedules rather than at the designated air time. Counter to the movie industry’s expectations, studios went on to make fortunes from the home video market driven by the technology they had tried to strangle in the crib.

Other courts have confronted whole-work copying that was instrumental in nature — using information gleaned from copyrighted works to create transformative new products. In Sega v. Accolade and Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix, the Ninth Circuit held that developers could copy entire software programs for reverse engineering when that copying was necessary to understand unprotected elements (in this case, the rules, procedures, and information needed to build software and platforms compatible with Sony and Sega products) and carried out for the purposes of a transformative use. Together with Sony v. Universal, these decisions establish that the third fair-use factor does not prevent complete copying — as we saw, the transformative purpose can require analysis of the whole work.

Courts applied the same principle to online indices and search engines. In Authors Guild v. Google, the Second Circuit held that Google could scan millions of books in full to create a searchable index, a use the court found “highly transformative” even though it involved wholesale copying of entire works without permission. Similarly, courts have permitted image-search engines to copy and display reduced-resolution thumbnails because the copies served a new function — helping users locate information — rather than simply replacing the original photographs.

The Supreme Court echoed the logic of the circuit courts in Google v. Oracle, holding that Google’s limited copying of Java’s Application Programming Interface (API) for building the Android platform was fair use. Google had copied parts of the API — which “allows programmers to call upon prewritten computing tasks for use in their own programs” — so programmers could use commands familiar to them when building smartphone apps for Android. The Court reasoned that Android was a transformative new platform and not a substitute for Java SE, that the copied code was largely functional (i.e., a method for operating the system rather than a form of creative expression), and that Google copied only what was needed to let programmers carry their existing knowledge of Java’s commands into the new Android environment. Above all, the Court emphasized copyright law should not become a barrier to the creative progress that is “the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself.”

The common theme in these cases is courts asking whether the “copying” of copyrighted material was used to generate new expression, new knowledge, or new public value — and ruling in defendants’ favor when they find that it has. This contrasts with the copying seen in the Napster line of cases and to some extent in Justice Story’s original consideration of George Washington biographies, where the copyrighted work was merely redistributed with little if any transformative elements.

Applying the fair use test to AI training

So where does AI training fall?

In June 2025, we received some strong signals. Two federal judges in the Northern District of California — Judge William Alsup in Bartz v. Anthropic and Judge Vince Chhabria in Kadrey v. Meta — issued the first major rulings applying the fair use test to generative AI training. Both cases involved a collection of authors accusing AI companies of copyright infringement for creating copies of their work and training AI models on them.

On the first three factors, the two judges reached a shared conclusion.

Applying the first factor — and the test established in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. — both judges found the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train a general-purpose AI model to be transformative. “Spectacularly so,” in the words of Judge Alsup.

It starts with how AI training works. Here’s Judge Alsup’s description:

Anthropic used copies of Authors’ copyrighted works to iteratively map statistical relationships between every text-fragment and every sequence of text-fragments so that a completed LLM could receive new text inputs and return new text outputs as if it were a human reading prompts and writing responses.

Let’s put that in simpler terms. The training process exposes a model to enormous quantities of text so that it can learn patterns in how words and concepts relate. Those patterns are reflected across billions of numerical parameters known as model weights. Those weights are not necessarily numerical representations of the content it is trained on, but rather a representation of what it learned about language from reading the text. For example, repeated exposure to sentences associating “speech” with positive values will cause training to adjust many model weights throughout the matrix defining how the model understands the relationship between “speech” and other words. As a result, when prompted about speech, the model may become more likely to describe it in positive terms. The reality is a bit more complex, but this gives you a rough idea what the millions of numerical parameters which inform the response to any given prompt look like.

Much like the information gleaned from reverse engineering Sega’s copyrighted software, the patterns an AI model learns are not necessarily copyrighted works. Copyright protects an author’s particular expression, not the broader relationships among words, concepts, themes, or writing techniques that readers — or even AI models — may learn and deploy from it.

But even when Judge Alsup accepted, for purposes of his ruling, the authors’ claim that the models had in some sense “memorized” copyright-protected elements of expression like stories and characters, he found that memorization didn’t change the “purpose or character” of using those works for training (i.e., to generate new expression).

Judge Alsup’s reasoning drew on the plaintiffs’ own analogy between AI training and teaching a person to read and write, an analogy which was built to show the copies were used as intended — to be read and learned from — rather than for a transformative new purpose. This analogy bore implications which cut strongly against the plaintiffs. As Judge Alsup put it, “if someone were to read all the modern-day classics because of their exceptional expression, memorize them, and then emulate a blend of their best writing, would that violate the Copyright Act? Of course not.” Copyright law has never required a reader to receive a license each time they recall a book or apply something they learned from it.

Unpersuaded by the plaintiffs’ arguments about AI models’ inputs, both judges focused on the outputs: whether infringing content made its way to readers. On the records before them, the judges found the evidence for that lacking. Judge Alsup wrote that Claude created “no exact copy, nor any substantial knock-off. Nothing traceable to Authors’ works.” Judge Chhabria likewise found that Meta’s AI model Llama “cannot currently be used to read or otherwise meaningfully access the plaintiffs’ books,” even when researchers used prompts designed to make the model reproduce copyrighted works.

The models also used output controls intended to reduce the risk that users could obtain infringing passages. Judge Alsup likened this to Google Books imposing limits on how many snippets of text a user could see from any book in its preview feature, “preventing its search tool from devolving into a reading tool.” Had Claude delivered infringing passages to users, he emphasized, the authors “would have a different case.”

So what was the copyrighted information used for, if not to reproduce copyrighted content? Judge Alsup stated it plainly: “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.” Likewise, seeing the novelty in what AI companies were doing with the copyrighted materials wasn’t a particularly tough call for Judge Chhabria: “There is no serious question that Meta’s use of the plaintiffs’ books had a ‘further purpose’ and ‘different character’ than the books.” While plaintiffs’ books were used for entertainment or education, he continued, Meta’s AI models could be used to edit emails, translate languages, write code, or any number of tasks: a brand new expressive product. This was “highly transformative.”

The second and third factors largely followed the path laid by earlier technology cases.

The second factor favored the authors because the works selected for training were “highly expressive” in nature — placing it “closer to the core of intended copyright protection” per Campbell than, say, the functional computer code in the Java API case — and were chosen for their expressive qualities. But this was not very significant by itself. Judge Alsup described the second factor’s principal role as helping courts assess the purpose and amount of the copying, while Judge Chhabria noted that it has “rarely played a significant role” in the ultimate fair-use determination.

The third factor, by contrast, favored the AI companies. Like the VCR, Google Books, and search engine cases, the copying of entire works was accepted if it was reasonably necessary to accomplish the transformative purpose. In the case of AI, as Judge Chhabria put it, “feeding a whole book to an LLM does more to train it than would feeding it only half of that book.”

The fourth factor: Market impact

The judges diverged most sharply on the fourth factor, which considers “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” Even more than the first factor, the Supreme Court at one point called it “the single most important element of fair use.” And in many ways, this factor captures the central stakes of the fight over AI training: To what extent is AI a legitimate competitor to traditional creative industries?

The factor also puts free-speech advocates in a tough position. On one hand, it’s important to preserve incentives to create. But on the other, it’s difficult for a free speech advocate to accept barriers to entry into the marketplace of expression. In the face of this conundrum, the judges adopted different approaches.

They agreed on direct substitution, the traditional fourth factor concern: whether the defendant’s use gives the public a replacement for the copyrighted work. As with the first factor, both judges viewed the theory as weak because neither system meaningfully reproduced the plaintiffs’ books such that they acted as substitutes. But the judges diverged on a broader and more novel question: Can AI harm authors in a copyright-relevant sense without reproducing their works at all?

The plaintiffs argued that models trained on copyrighted books could generate an enormous volume of competing expression, depressing the market for human-created works — including “by creating alternative summaries of factual events, alternative examples of compelling writing about fictional events” — even when no individual output was substantially similar to any one book. Judge Alsup considered this lawful competition from new expression, analogizing the claim to a complaint that “training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works.” The Copyright Act, in his view, “seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.”

Judge Chhabria took the concern more seriously. Generative AI, he reasoned, is unlike the creation of a single secondary work (i.e., a work utilizing copyrighted material) because it can produce “literally millions of secondary works, with a minuscule fraction of the time and creativity used to create the original works it was trained on.” In his view, that scale makes the big picture market substitution analysis highly relevant. AI-generated works could flood the same markets as those for specific human-created works and crowd out lesser-known authors even if well-known ones survive. He pointed to particularly vulnerable markets: An LLM capable of producing accurate information about current events, for example, could “greatly harm” the print news market. Similarly, books on subjects like cooking and gardening could be displaced by an LLM’s advice.

Judge Chhabria disagreed with his colleague as to whether this represented legitimate competition outside the purview of copyright law. He emphasized that the models compete better precisely because they were trained on the creative expression in the books they now compete against — feeding the “engines of their own destruction,” as the Authors Guild complaint put it.

And this indirect form of substitution was still substitution. Judge Chhabria explained that a reader who buys an AI-generated romance novel instead of a human-written one has replaced the latter with the former, and a world where that happens at scale is a world with lost sales and less incentive to write original works — cutting against the core purpose of copyright law.

But the plaintiffs never connected Llama’s capabilities to likely harm in the markets for their particular books, leading Judge Chhabria to rule for Meta in the absence of that evidence. Still, he warned that “it seems likely that market dilution will often cause plaintiffs to decisively win the fourth factor — and thus win the fair use question overall — in cases like this.”

Before moving on, there are a couple of points of clarification worth making. First, the market impact of AI training wasn’t the only cause for a split. Judge Alsup ruled Anthropic’s use of pirated copies — as opposed to the lawfully obtained copies considered in the analysis outlined above — was not fair use. This led to Anthropic paying out a $1.5 billion settlement to the plaintiffs to compensate for the 482,000 books which they had pirated for their use in AI training. Meta had more luck. Judge Chhabria’s emphasis on the market impact factor gave him little reason to treat lawful copies differently than pirated copies: “The loss of isolated sales to AI developers is not the kind of market harm that could tip the scales for the plaintiffs.”

Second, these are just the opinions of two district court judges. All the lawsuits brought by plaintiffs we detailed in the introduction — from John Grisham to Disney to The New York Times — remain pending, and it could be a while before we reach any definitive guidance from the higher courts. Still, the split between Judges Alsup and Chhabria on the fourth factor is a helpful indicator of one place the legal debate might center going forward.

Where does the First Amendment point?

So which way do First Amendment values point in this particular dispute? It can be a tough call. Underlying that call are questions where principled free speech advocates could reach different conclusions, and they speak to some of the same questions that have always made copyright a divisive subject: Can limiting the expression of one group be justified by incentivizing the expression of another group? From a constitutional standpoint, is human-created work more important to incentivize than AI-created work? Is the training process in any sense “theft?” Some questions are beyond the pay grade of a free speech advocate, and others, like what effects new technology will have on the market for expression, are anyone’s guess.

History has given us ample reason for caution in predicting the future. New technologies often look most threatening before their markets mature. The VCR was cast as an existential threat to Hollywood before becoming a major source of revenue. The internet devastated parts of the record industry’s old business model in part because of software like Napster, yet streaming later helped drive the industry to a period of incredible growth. So predictions of market harm may prove either prescient or badly mistaken.

In the face of this uncertainty, we’re left emphasizing traditional First Amendment concerns, and there are a number.

Chief among them is the classic fear of power over expression concentrating in a few hands. The plaintiffs’ theory of market dilution, if taken up and enforced by courts, would hand incumbent industries a veto over a process critical to a whole medium of expressive technology. And however the market for expression would have ultimately shaken out without interference, the immediate effect of accepting indirect dilution could be to let established industries wipe out or hamstring a new medium of expression. And unlike the Napster cases, this wouldn’t be for the act of redistributing copyrighted works free of charge, but because it learned from their works.

This risks weakening a key First Amendment safeguard on copyright law: the idea-expression distinction. Recall that the distinction is that copyright covers an author’s particular expression, not the underlying facts, ideas, and concepts. The plaintiffs’ theory puts AI-assisted creation in the infringing category because it learns relationships between words from their works, something plaintiffs themselves analogized to human reading and learning. Accepting this as a basis for activating the market dilution analysis would extend property rights over particular expression into the building blocks of language — ideas about grammar, structure, and sequencing — embedded in the expression, potentially hindering the use of those building blocks to create transformative new expression. And again, learning from existing ideas to produce new ones is what both the marketplace of ideas and the fair use doctrine seek to facilitate and protect.

Weakening First Amendment safeguards as AI becomes a powerful communications medium is learning the exact wrong lessons from the internet — where systems like notice-and-takedown implemented to protect copyright in the wake of a new technology too often worked by removing speech first and working out the details later (frequently to the detriment of fair use). We worry similarly about copyright being turned into a potent tool for AI censorship where public figures, corporations, and other powerful actors can weaponize the deference of automated copyright-abiding systems to police disparaging outputs. We need stronger First Amendment guardrails on copyright, not weaker ones.

Those guardrails sustain the ultimate principle giving copyright its place under the First Amendment — its design to promote the creation and spread of expression. It is a means, not an end. The theory contemplated by Judge Chhabria risks suppressing a new expressive medium for the aim of insulating existing markets from a forecast of existential threat that may prove mistaken. In fact, like the VCR, the incumbent creative industries may ultimately find AI lowers the cost of creation and bolsters their industries rather than rendering them obsolete.

So does training AI on large datasets fall under fair use and First Amendment protection? We’ve received some early evidence that it belongs in the same fair use tradition as the VCR, the search engine, and digital libraries, even while there might be a dispute on the market impact factor. Courts will have to resolve those questions. Whatever answers emerge, the First Amendment interest will be the same: The application of copyright to AI should result in more speech rather than less. That means more knowledge created, more ideas exchanged, more methods of expression in more hands. If the courts embrace a theory that has the opposite effect — one that diminishes our ability to create and share new speech — we’d risk losing in copyright law what has been a powerful tool for encouraging expression to the side of censorship.

Universities exist to advance knowledge through cutting-edge research and by training the next generation of thought leaders. Artificial intelligence is a growing part of that work. Yet a bill moving quickly through the California Assembly threatens to place political constraints on its reach as a tool for research and exploration.

Assembly Bill 2392 would require the California State University and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges to convene a working group and establish procurement standards for generative AI — or GenAI — in line with certain state requirements. These requirements include ensuring that GenAI tools are evaluated for “potential harms, misuses, abuses, and bias,” and ensuring they will not produce “harmful” or “illegal” content. Although the bill provides a few examples of covered content, such as “disordered eating,” they don’t cure the underlying issue: these terms have no settled meaning and often depend on contested political and social judgments, making this mandate as broad as it is subjective.

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And while universities have a legitimate interest in prohibiting and responding to unlawful uses of their resources, vague anti-bias and anti-harm restrictions could prompt institutions to procure watered-down GenAI that avoids controversial ideas.

Imagine a professor using GenAI to identify statistical correlations between crime and mental illness — research that might raise uncomfortable conclusions about institutionalization, homelessness, and public safety. She won’t get very far with GenAI that finds support for institutionalization stigmatizing and avoids “harmful” outputs. This tool might avoid such sensitive correlations or qualify answers so heavily that analysis becomes difficult. These system reluctances could permeate other delicate subjects like extremism, poverty, sex and gender, and race.

This is particularly unacceptable at universities, which are supposed to encourage students and faculty to confront difficult truths about our society and ourselves. In this way, members of the campus community educate themselves and push the boundaries of human knowledge. But that process short circuits if the tools provided by universities prevent unvarnished truth seeking.

These concerns extend beyond research. A philosophy student can explore an unpopular worldview by engaging GenAI in a back-and-forth debate. Such exercises are not only common in higher education, but indispensable to rigorous inquiry. It’s one way to avoid what John Stuart Mill called the “dead dogma” problem, where people continue to profess a belief without understanding or being able to defend the reasons for it. GenAI systems are ready-made devil’s advocates — available on demand to every student. But they can’t fill this role if they are trained to avoid the arguments students need to confront.

To be clear, nothing in this bill directly prevents people from using non-procured GenAI. However, university policies may only allow school-approved GenAI systems in various contexts, including when working with student records, unpublished research, sensitive data, or information subject to confidentiality obligations. If AB 2392’s standards cause schools to procure heavily limited tools, many people on campus will be left with AI systems incapable of facilitating intellectual pursuits.

California can ensure responsible GenAI use in higher education without undermining its educational and research potential through restrictions that cause it to deny, obscure, and avoid sensitive issues or “biased” answers. Lawmakers, for example, can order public institutions to provide training on the lawful use of GenAI or how to use AI effectively. These steps do not require restrictions that may limit a GenAI system’s ability to explore controversial or sensitive subjects.

Higher education should be empowering today’s experts and tomorrow’s leaders to break new ground across a wide array of subjects. That’s hard to sustain when state rules push campus tools to dodge difficult, unpopular, or outright offensive topics.

Max Friedman is a rising third-year law student at the University of Memphis.

Censorship in the name of combating antisemitism has become a fact of contemporary political life. Whether through retaliation against individuals expressing protest slogans on campus, state laws codifying the deeply flawed IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism, or overbroad Title VI enforcement, state actors have exploited fears of antisemitism in ways that suppress pro-Palestinian activism.

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To be clear, FIRE takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and fears of antisemitic conduct are far from unfounded given widely publicized reports of rapid increases in antisemitic violence. It also goes without saying that identifying and condemning perceived antisemitism is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet all too often, activists and governments blur the line between arguably unpleasant but protected speech and unprotected conduct like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement to imminent lawless action.

Implicit in this campaign against allegedly antisemitic speech is the idea that some “hateful” or “dangerous” speech should be suppressed because it might inspire others to discriminate or commit violence against Jews. These paternalistic arguments are not new, and they are deeply flawed. To illustrate, let’s turn the clock back a century.

In 1923, New York police entered Broadway’s Apollo Theater and shut down an English-language production of a popular Yiddish play, Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome (“God of Vengeance”). Officers arrested the entire cast and production team, including prominent First Amendment lawyer Harry Weinberger of Abrams v. United States fame. The raid led to a sprawling obscenity trial that sharply divided the New York Jewish community.

Got fun nekome was supposedly “obscene” because it portrayed a Jewish family that defied norms of gender and social status. A violent and controlling father operates a brothel in his basement, masks his corruption with hypocritical piety, and desecrates a Torah scroll. His daughter rebels from an arranged marriage and falls in love with one of the brothel’s female prostitutes, whom she caresses and kisses in the rain (the first kiss between two women to appear on a Broadway stage). Needless to say, none of this is “obscene” under modern constitutional standards. But ultimately, the jury found each of the defendants guilty of obscenity, relying on the prosecution’s description of the production’s “immoral” and “salacious” contents.

Some Jewish leaders at the time feared that the play’s portrayal of Jews would inflame antisemitic stereotypes. They argued it portrayed the father’s immorality as uniquely Jewish — contrary to Asch’s intended broader social critique that happened to feature Jewish characters. Rabbi Joseph Silverman, a prominent leader in the New York Jewish community, noted the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment directed against Yiddish-speaking Jews and claimed that the play “libels the Jewish religion.” (Rabbi Silverman, in fact, had filed the criminal complaint that led to the raid.)

The judge overseeing the trial even cited these concerns in his statements following the verdict. As reported in the Yiddish newspaper of record, Forverts (“Forward”), the judge proclaimed, “God of Vengeance has been condemned by Jews, like Silverman and others. According to them, the play does not communicate the right message about Jewish life and doesn’t paint the Jewish woman in a good light.”

Meanwhile, the play’s advocates relied on principles of free expression. Weinberger, defending himself and the rest of the cast, argued that the case implicated bedrock civil liberties (and later succeeded in having the convictions reversed on evidentiary grounds). Prominent figures, including the editor-in-chief of Forverts, testified to the play’s artistic merit. And as Asch himself wrote in an open letter, “Jews do not need to clear themselves before any one. . . . I think that the apologetic writer, who tries to place Jews in a false, even though white light, does them more harm than good in the eyes of the Gentiles.”

Asch’s response draws on a cornerstone free speech principle: what we consider “true” or “dangerous” can change, sometimes very rapidly. John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that we must embrace speakers’ right to express controversial, unpopular ideas, because those ideas may in fact be true. And even if they are not, the proper remedy is truthful speech, not censorship. Got fun nekome is a case in point. Today, the play’s rejection of racialized essentialism and embrace of same-sex relationships are points of pride for many Yiddish theater aficionados; and its radicalism in its own era inspired Paula Vogel’s award-winning play Indecent. Suppressing Got fun nekome — even assuming it might have prevented some gentiles from believing negative stereotypes about Jews — would have erased what many view as a transformative work of Jewish art.

So let Sholem Asch’s words guide us now. The mere fact that a message could provoke ill will toward Jews does not justify stamping it out in the name of Jewish safety. Indeed, as the Got fun nekome scandal shows, the nebulous notion of “dangerous” speech has encompassed controversial expression by influential Jewish cultural figures like Asch. The government may regulate select categories like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement, but the First Amendment protects most provocative and uncomfortable speech. And often — especially with time — “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

Athena Rem is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Televangelist Jerry Falwell once confessed in an interview to drunken sex with his unconscious mother in an outhouse. Except it wasn’t a real interview. It was a fake Campari ad in a 1983 issue of adult magazine Hustler.

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Falwell sued the magazine and its publisher Larry Flynt for emotional distress, libel, and invasion of privacy. Flynt defended the ad’s publication as protected by the First Amendment. What came next remains one of the most famous free speech cases in American jurisprudence.

Flynt won the case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), because parody is not a statement of fact made with “actual malice” and because print media, shows, or any other publications can generally criticize public figures under the First Amendment.

Yet such critical speech is under fire today more than ever before. And these modern efforts to silence critics risk blunting Americans of the cultural institution of satire. Late-night shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live routinely mimic and mock public figures, and it’s important they be able to do so. Because humor isn’t merely entertaining — it’s also one of the most powerful forms of political commentary.

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel speaks about political issues in his opening monologues. When his show airs, that is. A notable exception occurred when the FCC pressured ABC to suspend his show in September 2025 over anti-MAGA commentary about Charlie Kirk’s murder. Without resistance, this incident may not be the last of its kind. “Unless we resist each attempt at government-driven censorship,” says Garrett Gravley, FIRE’s program counsel, “the next suspension may not be so brief.”

Despite how significantly FCC jawboning can threaten the flow of information, the legal response to date has been scarce. The unique rise in First Amendment violations within the last year that specifically target this niche of entertainment make it even more necessary to find an effective corrective measure.

Looking back to the 1950s provides some insight. The House Un-American Activities Committee, following McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, encouraged the denial of screenwriting and acting jobs to supposed communists through repeated investigations and contempt citations. Though the recommendation in and of itself was problematic, a primary reason the problem persisted and grew was that studio heads refused to ignore or deny unconstitutional calls for blacklisting by the government.

Indeed, cultural change occurred only when Universal Studios allowed a blacklisted producer to receive credit at the end of a movie in 1960. At the very least, cultural response, indignation, or desire to change is a prerequisite to stopping sanctions on entertainment.

Falwell lost because the Court understood an essential truth: a democracy confident enough to laugh at its leaders and other powerful figures is stronger, not weaker. If that principle no longer holds, satire won’t be the last casualty of censorship.

Elyse Everest is a rising junior at Boston College from Honolulu, Hawaii, studies international studies and transformative education.

From 1896 until 1986, and over 5,000 miles from where the U.S. Constitution was written, the Hawaiian Islands were subject to one of the most harmful and forgotten large-scale violations of free speech in our nation’s history.

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Although Hawaii did not become a state until 1959, the Hawaiian language ban of 1896, or Act 57, made English mandatory in all public and private schools. In practice, this meant corporal punishment and public humiliation for children caught speaking the Hawaiian language (ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi) on school grounds, a policy that survived annexation, the territorial period, and statehood itself, remaining on the books until the state legislature quietly discovered and repealed it in 1986.

Speakers recall being forced to pull a weed for every Hawaiian word spoken in class, or being taken home by a teacher who would tell their parents to stop using Hawaiian at home. These systematic efforts to suppress the use of the Hawaiian language nearly drove it to extinction. By 1985, it was estimated that only 32 children could speak Hawaiian fluently across all eight islands.

There seemed to be no hope for revitalization, but in the 1970s, a group of activists worked hard to bring the language back. The most foundational effort along those lines was a radio show produced by one such activist, Larry Kimura, who had his elders speak Hawaiian together, leaving listeners unsure and curious about what they were saying. This inspired great interest and commotion in the community, and led to further efforts to bring Hawaiian back to the classroom — and establish Hawaiian immersion schools.

In the 1923 case Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska law requiring instruction in English and barring the teaching of modern foreign languages in any public or private school to students who had not yet passed the eighth grade. The law was the result of anti-German sentiment during and after World War I. Under the Wilson administration, German Americans faced enormous pressure to demonstrate patriotism. Many bought Liberty Bonds, enlisted in the military, abandoned German-language newspapers, anglicized their names, and stopped speaking German in public — which could invite suspicion or harassment.

But the Court held that Nebraska’s law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it unconstitutionally interfered with parents’ rights to direct their children’s education. It held that a state cannot ban the teaching of foreign languages to young children, even in private schools, simply because lawmakers want everyone to speak English. Today, Meyer is best known as an early case protecting parental rights in directing their children’s education. And although Meyer was not a First Amendment case, its broad understanding of individual liberty helped lay the groundwork for later decisions that applied many constitutional rights — including free speech protections — to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Furthermore, in the 1920s, the Territory of Hawaii attempted to place private Japanese-language schools (along with Chinese and Korean schools) under strict government control — regulating teachers, textbooks, and hours. In the 1927 case Farrington v. Tokushige, the Court unanimously struck down the regulations, extending Meyer to hold that parents have a Fifth Amendment due process liberty interest in directing their children’s education, including foreign-language instruction.

When targeting a nation and its people, restricting speech is the first and most detrimental step. Hawaiian was fortunate to experience a renaissance. As Kimura put it, “language is the first aspect of a people to vanish.”

This is because censors understand a simple but eternal truth: Being able to say what you want, how you want, and in whatever language you want, is one of the most powerful tools that people can wield against their government.

It may be tempting to treat the history of the Hawaiian language as peripheral to mainstream First Amendment doctrine due to the islands’ geographic and, at times, political distance from Washington. But in fact, that history exposes one of the doctrine’s central tensions: the difference between constitutional principle and constitutional reality. A population annexed into the United States, governed for decades without meaningful representation in the national political process, and largely unable to rely on ordinary democratic mechanisms, was especially dependent on constitutional guarantees to protect fundamental liberties. Yet those guarantees arrived unevenly.

The gap between Meyer’s 1923 recognition that language choice is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and Hawaii’s 1986 repeal of its English-only law is not a footnote. It illustrates how constitutional protections have often been uneven in practice. Hawaii’s experience therefore belongs not in the margins of First Amendment history but near its center, reminding us that constitutional doctrine is not measured by the rights courts declare, but by how long it takes those rights to become realities for the people they are meant to protect.

That unevenness has consequences that outlast the original harm. Hawaii has consistently had some of the lowest voter turnout in the nation. No single historical event explains that on its own, but it is difficult to expect deep trust in constitutional government from people whose own experience taught them that constitutional rights could arrive decades too late. If the Constitution did not protect your language when it mattered most, why should you instinctively believe it will protect your rights now?

Hawaii has never lacked civic talent. The islands produced Senator Daniel Inouye, one of the longest-serving senators in American history, and President Barack Obama. The problem was never the people. It was that the constitutional protections articulated in cases like Meyer took far too long to reach them. Even Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 ruling recognizing that the First Amendment prohibits punishment of public school students for non-disruptive speech, was decided 17 years before the repeal of Act 57.

No federal statute designates any official national language, religion, or culture. In public schools, English-only instruction is not a constitutional imperative — it’s a policy choice with real costs. But Hawaii’s campaign went much further. By imposing that mandate on private schools and punishing children for speaking Hawaiian, the government intruded on parents’ authority over their children’s education, violated students’ First Amendment rights, and helped sever a people from their language and identity. You don’t have to ban books or arrest speakers to suppress a language. You just have to make sure the next generation never learns it in the first place.

So why does this little island chain matter to the rest of the country? Because the suppression of the Hawaiian language proves the point that rights delayed are often rights denied, and the damage doesn’t end when the law finally catches up. It lingers in culture, civic trust, and the relationship between a people and the government that was supposed to protect their identity and their voice.

Athena Rem is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

When Bud Selig famously wrote that “baseball is a social institution,” clearly he did not have the First Amendment in mind.

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Currently, 29 out of 30 Major League Baseball teams host an annual “Pride Night” celebration in June, featuring rainbow versions of the typical logo on caps and jerseys. The leagues issue similar themed uniforms for other holidays like Mother’s Day. Per the collective bargaining agreement struck between owners and players, players always have the option to revert back to the standard uniform instead, but they may not alter their uniforms themselves in any aspect.

Despite this ban, three San Francisco Giants players used Pride Night 2026 as an opportunity to protest. Starting pitcher Landen Roupp, among others, adorned his Pride cap with Bible verses from Genesis that portray the rainbow as a symbol of God’s covenant with humanity. In response, MLB formally warned the implicated players that they may not “write, attach, affix, embroider or otherwise display nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment.”

At first blush, MLB’s move might appear to be at odds with the freedoms of speech and free exercise guaranteed by the First Amendment. But the First Amendment bars the government from restricting our rights to speak and worship freely — not private corporations. Private employers have expansive discretion to limit an employee’s on-the-clock expression, like the players’ alteration of their caps.

Nevertheless, legal responses to MLB are pending. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote a strongly worded letter to MLB accusing them of discrimination for the warning issued to the Giants players. Along similar lines, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into whether MLB’s restriction violates religious liberty. Indeed, MLB could be legally responsible for its actions here if the league were discriminating against players on the basis of their faith. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Roupp and his fellow players would have to prove they suffered an adverse employment action solely on the basis of their Christianity rather than their violation of a neutral workplace policy.

Arguing that the league’s stance is anti-Christian discrimination runs up against the extent to which MLB has made clear that any sort of alteration to a uniform is a punishable offense. For example, the league enforces the same rule for messages like “Dad” that have no religious or political subtext. Further, the players would have to demonstrate that writing the Bible verses on their hat comprised a meaningful form of worship to claim MLB is impeding their right to exercise their religion. And as a private corporation, preventing alterations to their uniform is within the MLB’s purview.

Legal and constitutional concerns aside, culture war skirmishes like the MLB controversy shape free speech’s place in our society.

The government leaning on private corporations as a vehicle for censorship is especially problematic. Allowing unsubstantiated culture wars to seep into private corporations’ functions, especially as the DOJ threatens to get involved, holds dangerous consequences for the future. Restricting MLB’s ability to ban Bible inscriptions on caps or uniforms would essentially prove that any entity, even a private one, is a potential battleground for government advancement of its own rhetoric at the expense of individual liberties.

When players sign their contracts, they must adhere to MLB’s lawful choices regarding political, religious, or other identity-based topics. Players need not endorse these beliefs outside of their work, but they also do not enjoy the freedom to alter MLB uniforms to match their own views.

Even America’s pastime is under threat from partisan encroachment. If the government can abridge MLB’s rights, there is nothing stopping them from eventually infringing on the average individual’s speech as well.

Amuda Balu is a rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies government.

Correction: An earlier version of this essay incorrectly described the College Sports Commission as part of the NCAA. The CSC is an independent organization.

“The first thing to understand about NIL is that nobody fully understands NIL.”

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That’s how college sports reporter Ross Dellenger summed up the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s decision in 2021 to let athletes benefit from their names, images, and likenesses. Since then, the NIL policy has given way to an unpredictable marketplace where athletes sign endorsement deals worth millions, the transfer portal is the most chaotic since its 2018 debut, and nearly every state plays by a rulebook of its own.

Legislatures have therefore stepped onto the field with various bills, including most recently, the Protect College Sports Act. But before Congress rewrites the playbook, any new rules must survive First Amendment review.

The NCAA’s model wasn’t always so messy. But that all changed when the Supreme Court held in NCAA v. Alston (2021) that limiting education-related compensation violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. This resulted in the patchwork landscape of compliance we see today, with the NCAA yielding to state authorities on the matter, producing uncertainty for athletes, schools, and conferences. But can these laws pass muster of the First Amendment?

NIL agreements are about more than money. They are also about expression. Student athletes earn compensation by appearing in advertisements, promoting products on social media, and publicly associating themselves with brands. These activities therefore qualify as speech, which receives First Amendment protection. Yet many of our current state and university NIL laws do not seem to withstand constitutional scrutiny. Two types of common restrictions in particular are concerning: restrictions for contracts in vice industries and those relating to institutional values.

Many universities and states do not allow athletes to engage in contracts that are in vice industries such as alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. These types of restrictions are mandatory for all institutions in the state of Texas. But by restricting the brand deals they can enter, the government is directly limiting the associations that athletes are making.

The other type of restriction involves broad bans on industries that conflict with a university’s general values. But this opens the door for institutions to restrict essentially any expression they deem controversial or inappropriate. This provides universities too much judgment and does not afford enough protection under the First Amendment.

All this growing confusion has led to one point of agreement in the NIL debate: the current system has become too difficult to manage. Coaches complain that differing state laws create recruiting advantages. Universities struggle to comply with constantly changing regulations. Meanwhile, the NCAA has found itself unable to enforce its own policies. A federal framework would establish clear rules for everyone involved and deter practices that have blurred the line between legitimate endorsements, which are constitutionally protected, and pay-for-play recruiting, where athletes are compensated to attend or remain at a specific school.

While previous congressional attempts at regulating NIL have failed, the Protect College Sports Act (co-authored by Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell) is headed to the Senate floor for a vote.

The Act includes various provisions including an antitrust exemption so that the NCAA can enforce caps on athletes’ payments and other rules relating to transfers and eligibility. The concerning aspects, however, are the limits it places on NIL.

One of these allows institutions to declare a student-athlete ineligible if they enter into an NIL agreement that violates the institution’s code of student conduct, so long as that code applies to all students. At first glance, this appears to be a sensible limitation. Rather than imposing athlete-specific speech restrictions as other state legislation, Congress attempts to place student-athletes on equal footing with the rest of the student body.

However, this merely shifts the constitutional inquiry. At public universities, student conduct codes themselves are constrained by the First Amendment. If an institution adopts vague standards prohibiting conduct that conflicts with its values, those policies may be used to deny athletic eligibility based on protected expressive activity.

The act also requires certain NIL deals to serve a “valid business purpose,” defined as a purpose genuinely related to promoting goods or services offered to the public for profit. The independent College Sports Commission, which enforces NCAA rules adopted in connection with the House settlement, has declined to clear nearly $90 million in proposed NIL deals under that and related standards.

The confusion surrounding “valid business purposes” presents a key issue: the vagueness of these standards allows governing boards to capriciously decide what is and is not a valid business purpose. While this rule was created to prevent pay-for-play practices, it undermines the First Amendment by allowing those in power to dictate what kinds of expression are “valid.”

Despite common assumptions, the commercial nature of these NIL agreements does not place them outside of First Amendment protection. While these deals seem solely like restrictions on conduct, they necessarily involve expression. As the Court has recognized in its campaign finance jurisprudence, spending money facilitates speech. The mere fact that athletes are compensated — and compete in collegiate rather than professional athletics — does not eliminate the First Amendment interests of their NIL activity.

Moreover, some argue that no one has a constitutional right to engage in sports. But debating whether participating in collegiate athletics is a right or a privilege misses the point. The government cannot require student athletes to forfeit their First Amendment rights simply because they choose to compete. The constitution does not stop at kickoff. Congress has an obligation to ensure that athletes’ rights are respected both on and off the field.

The broader lesson remains the same: NIL exists at the intersection of commerce and expression. Every sponsored Instagram post, commercial appearance, or brand partnership communicates a message as well as generates income. Regulations that burden those expressive activities must therefore satisfy the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment.

The current NIL landscape undoubtedly calls for reform. A fragmented system of state laws has produced confusion, competitive imbalance, and First Amendment concerns across collegiate athletics. But replacing fifty different rulebooks with one federal rulebook is not enough. If Congress wants to restore order to college sports, it must do so in a way that avoids committing a constitutional foul. Otherwise, the next flag may not come from the NCAA, but from the First Amendment.

If we’re not careful about making free expression non-negotiable in emerging technology, it will be the authoritarians’ world — and the rest of us will just be living in it.

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That much is clear in a new report from Meta’s Oversight Board, which found that “some of the world’s most-used models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta and OpenAI are significantly less likely to criticize political regimes that restrict free expression.” Users in free countries are experiencing “free speech infringements by proxy,” meaning that censorial foreign powers may be shaping the material LLMs produce to people outside of their borders. That is incredibly dangerous for how we discuss, research, and understand the world around us.

Why is it happening? And what does it mean for AI users? Let’s dive in.

The findings on political content about repressive regimes

They’re troubling.

Conducted using an IP address in Australia, the Board’s survey found that models “were more than twice as likely to refuse to criticize repressive regimes” compared to freer nations. When prompted to produce “politically critical materials,” on average the models refused a shocking 45% requests about China, nearly matched at 43% for Thailand, then followed by Cambodia and Saudi Arabia hovering just over 30%. Compare that to the U.S. and UK, where denial rates averaged just under 10%.

The ways that LLMs refused to answer were notable, too. In some cases, no meaningful response is provided. But in others, the models suggested that they were not willing to expose users — or even the models themselves — to breaches of censorship laws. One of the justifications Claude Opus 4 provided was that it didn’t want to “put individuals at risk.” Gemini 3 Pro flat out said it would not “generate content that critiques the King of Thailand or violates lèse-majesté laws,” Thai laws that aggressively punish insults and critiques of the monarchy. (Thailand has targeted government critics for speech they have posted freely in other nations.)

The Board’s report cautioned that the reasons for these findings could be complex. Results “could be shaped at various points throughout the model development process, including latent biases in training data, the complex interaction of many different approaches to align model behavior, deliberate restrictions or any combination of these factors.”

The broader speech environment tech is swimming in

While the factors behind these results are complex, one thing is clear-cut: People are using LLMs around the world, and some countries have deeply restrictive censorship laws that will inevitably create a burden on speech abroad. Even companies much further removed from expressive content, like hotel chains and airlines, are under pressure to abide by authoritarian nations’ preferences and politics.

That burden may come from overt demands, like a court order or a government official’s retaliatory threats. Look at Reuters, for example, which complied with a 2023 Indian court order demanding an investigative piece be removed from “public domain” by temporarily taking down the article globally, not just for Indian readers.

But it can also come from a place of cowardice or profit-seeking, either in the administration and leadership of these companies or in the way their models are directed to operate. Here is the ugly truth about authoritarian censorship seeping across borders: It often takes place with no explicit threat at all. Executives see the writing on the wall and simply presume self-censorship is a precondition for market access and voluntarily decide to play ball.

I discuss this incentive in higher education at length in my recent book Authoritarians in the Academy, which documents how American universities have chipped away at their core values of academic freedom and free expression in pursuit of the financial and expansion opportunities offered by oppressive governments.

But there was also a direct admission from a tech company when Midjourney’s CEO openly admitted the AI image-generating tool’s policies would hew to China’s censorship laws and prohibit satirical images of Xi Jinping. The reason? Market access, of course. “Political satire in china [sic] is pretty not-okay,” CEO David Holz said, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” Because China limits what its people can say, Midjourney chose to pass that restriction along to the rest of the world.

Be wary of corporations that claim to censor for users’ own good when that censorship may be good for the corporation, too.

Why this matters for what we see and say

We no longer live in the days when a person who wants to say something just needs to know what local or national laws are on the books. What you can say online, and sometimes even offline, may be influenced and determined by a panoply of overlapping foreign speech laws. The same goes for what you can read, learn, and generate on the internet, from an online classroom to a social media platform to the LLM you use for work or study.

These manipulated results affect the millions, and perhaps billions, of people who are growing increasingly reliant on AI in their work, research, and play. But it will subtly affect many more people than just the direct users of LLMs. As writers, creators, companies, educators, and researchers generate content for broader audiences, it will influence political and historical material at scale — whether shared in books, movies, social media content, or more — for consumers unaware of the bias incorporated into the models producing it.

What a victory it represents for authoritarians to see their repression ripple far beyond their own police and prisons into technology that shapes what people say and understand about them and the world.

If we’re not careful to guard against the willful or unintentional influence of foreign censorship laws or practices, the intelligence these models provide may prove artificial indeed.

“We are going to court to defend our journalists’ rights to report freely on the administration and to provide the public with stories that matter.”

— David McCraw, senior vice president of The New York Times on filing a motion to quash subpoenas served on journalists over Air Force One coverage.

America is failing its own free speech standards

Federal agents showed up at a New York man’s home over an email telling former ICE head Todd Lyons his conscience will haunt him forever. That’s the sort of government response Americans usually criticize abroad, not something we should normalize here.

“Even children sitting in their first American civics class could tell you that freedom is most adequately defined by what we are free from,” writes for The Next Move. “It’s time our leaders relearned that lesson.”

Colleges pay fat settlements over Kirk firings

Public colleges and other government employers that punished faculty and staff for protected speech about Charlie Kirk’s assassination are now writing checks worth hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars. It’s a costly reminder that government officials don’t get to suspend constitutional rights without paying the price.

“Just as the First Amendment protects those who praise Kirk’s work and legacy,” writes , “it also protects those who criticize the man. A cancel-culture cycle in the wake of a tragedy is nothing new. But censoring speech only scares people from voicing their opinions.”

Below the fold

• Michigan State University’s new ethics policy tells trustees to keep disagreements behind closed doors once the board votes. That’s tidy for administrators, but not so much for journalists, who just lost some of their best sources. tells the story and explains why the policy raises serious transparency and First Amendment concerns.

• The New York Times wants a federal court to quash grand jury subpoenas served on reporters for their coverage of security concerns over President Trump’s Qatari-donated aircraft. The paper says the subpoenas strike at the heart of press freedom by threatening journalists’ ability to gather news and protect sources. The case could become a major test of federal protections for reporters.

International

Germany is considering legislation that would make publicly denying Israel’s right to exist a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Whether one agrees with the sentiment or not, it’s another reminder of how dramatically European speech laws diverge from the First Amendment’s much broader protections.

A newly disclosed Canadian government memo reveals officials are developing a national strategy to combat misinformation. Exactly what that entails remains anyone’s guess, thanks to heavily redacted sections discussing possible legal action. That uncertainty alone is enough to raise concerns about government pressure on platforms — or worse, penalties for protected speech dressed up as anti-misinformation efforts.

In her latest Free Speech Dispatch, Sarah McLaughlin tells how the global crusade to ban teens from social media is advancing across Europe, Hong Kong arrested five booksellers on sedition charges, Germany brought new criminal charges against author , JK Rowling is suing Amnesty UK, and SpongeBob SquarePants has run afoul of Russia’s LGBT ban.

Tech

In the latest in our ongoing series on AI and free speech, asks a deceptively simple question: Should you have to flash your ID before asking a chatbot a question? He argues that age-gating can quickly morph into full-blown ID checks, requiring selfies, biometric scans, government IDs, or other personal data just to access lawful information. The result, Coleman warns, could be a “papers, please” internet where people think twice before researching sensitive topics, exploring controversial ideas, or even asking awkward questions — because nothing encourages free inquiry quite like having to upload your driver’s license first.

Government

Culture

Podcasts

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define it, hosted by FIRE’s .

In this episode, Nico sits down with University of Chicago professor Ada Palmer to explore the history of censorship from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss what motivates censorship, why it evolves alongside new communication technologies, how effective it has been throughout history, and what historical patterns can teach us about today’s free speech debates.

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar .

In this episode, New York Times journalist joins to discuss his new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution. This biography tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy, but whose legacy was lost to scandal.

Today in history with

On July 14, 1798, President John Adams signed the Sedition Act into law as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a package of laws that lengthened the naturalization process, expanded the president’s authority to detain and deport noncitizens, and restricted political speech. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the federal government, Congress, or the president. In practice, the law was used to silence critics of the Adams administration. Newspaper editors, publishers, and political opponents affiliated with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party were among those prosecuted.

One of the Act’s earliest targets was Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. In September 1798, Bache was arrested on charges of seditious libel after accusing Adams of nepotism and mocking him as “the blind, bald, crippled, toothless, querulous Adams.” He was released on bail but died of yellow fever before his trial. The law — which expired on the final day of Adams’s presidency in 1801, after Congress declined to renew it — also reached ordinary citizens. Luther Baldwin was convicted and fined $100 after, upon hearing a cannon salute during a parade attended by Adams in Newark, New Jersey, he remarked, “I hope it hit Adams in the backside.”

By the numbers

While censorship efforts from the left and the right occur with similar frequency, writes Sean Stevens, they take fundamentally different forms.

Efforts from the left typically originate on campus and are usually led by students, while efforts from the right typically originate off campus and are usually led by activist groups, public officials, or wealthy donors. Efforts from the left tend to use op-eds, social media, and online petitions to get their message across while efforts from the right threaten budgets, launch investigations, and demand resignations.

Another major difference is that efforts from the left tend to be more successful — about 50% succeed, compared to only about 40% from the right.

This is part of a weekly series on AI and free speech.

The internet is one of the main places where we read, learn, ask questions, and share ideas. It serves as a library, bookstore, classroom, and town square all at once. For decades, most people have been able to use those online spaces without first proving who they are.

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That may be changing. Legislatures across the United States are passing laws requiring online platforms and other digital services to determine users’ ages before granting access. Some proposals focus on adult-content websites. Others target social media and app stores. Now, increasingly, they target artificial intelligence.

At first glance, these laws seem to ask a simple question: How old are you? But answering it isn’t so simple. Is checking a box enough? Can a company estimate your age from a selfie? Should it rely on information from your device or app store? Or must you verify your age by uploading a government-issued ID?

What begins as age assurance can result in identity verification. As systems demand more certainty about your age, the more personal information it often needs to collect.

This carries consequences beyond privacy. Throughout American history, anonymity has played an important role in free expression. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under cloak of anonymity. Thomas Paine first published Common Sense anonymously. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that anonymity encourages people to express unpopular or controversial views without fear of retaliation. And the internet has carried that tradition forward by allowing people to share and obtain information without having to stand up in a crowd.

Artificial intelligence is now one of the latest advances in human communication. Millions of people use it to search for information, learn new skills, explore unfamiliar ideas, and think through difficult questions. As lawmakers nationwide propose age-gating access to AI models, debate centers on whether identifying yourself will become a routine part of using one.

This guide explains the different approaches to age assurance, why lawmakers are considering requiring them, and what those choices could mean for free expression and free inquiry in America.

What is age assurance?

Before going further, it’s worth clarifying the terminology.

People often use the terms “age verification” and “age assurance” interchangeably, but they mean different things. Age assurance includes any method of figuring out whether you are old enough to use a product or service. Age verification is one form of age assurance that relies on a trusted credential to confirm a person’s age.

Not every age-assurance system works the same way. Some simply ask you to check a box if you’re over a certain age. Others infer your age from existing account information, payment methods, or browsing behavior. Some analyze a selfie or short video. Others ask you to upload your driver’s license, passport, or another government-issued ID.

Each approach involves tradeoffs. The honor system is simple, but people can lie. Age inference requires companies to monitor your online activity over time. Facial estimates require you to reveal unique biometric data. And providing a government-issued ID requires you to directly reveal your name and address.

When does an age-gate become an ID check?

If proving your age requires identifying biometrics, a driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID, guess what? Now it’s also identity verification.

Think of a store clerk deciding whether to card you. They make a quick judgment about whether you look over 18 or 21. If they’re unsure, they ask for your driver’s license. The interaction lasts a few seconds, confirms one fact, then it’s over. The clerk doesn’t keep a permanent record of your biometric data or your identity.

Online, things don’t quite work that way. A website or app can’t glance at your face and hand your ID back. Instead, many forms of age verification require processing — and sometimes storing — personal information.

The challenge doesn’t end there. Some laws don’t tell companies how to determine a user’s age. Instead, they impose age-based obligations or require “commercially reasonable” age-assurance methods, leaving companies to decide how to comply.

As a result, users may encounter multiple age checks. In some cases, the law requires a check before you access an operating system or enter an app store. Other laws leave room for interpretation, prompting companies to add additional age checks to reduce legal risk. An app might verify your age. A platform or chatbot might ask again before you can access certain features.

And no age assurance method is perfect. People lie about their age, software guesses wrong, driver’s licenses can be borrowed or forged. Every failure justifies one more check.

This is more than an inconvenience. The First Amendment protects the freedom to speak and explore unfamiliar ideas without fear. Without it, people may choose the safety of silence instead. Researchers conducting a study at Carnegie Mellon University found that nearly everyone in the study was willing to check a box to confirm their age, but only 22–28% were willing to show a government ID. The others walked away, even when they were told their information would be deleted afterward.

New technologies continue to emerge, but the constitutional questions remain — particularly whether people should have to prove their eligibility before accessing lawful speech in the first place.

Applying the First Amendment

The First Amendment protects the rights both to speak and to receive information and ideas, including the ability to do so anonymously. When a law requires people to identify themselves before posting online or accessing lawful speech, the law burdens those rights.

Yet a growing wave of state legislation requiring age assurance across the digital ecosystem are violating those principles. Many of these laws therefore face challenges in court for chilling speech and eliminating user anonymity. FIRE has participated in many of those cases as counsel or as a friend-of-the-court, including important challenges involving social media and adult-content websites. App-store age-assurance laws are also the subject of ongoing litigation in states such as Texas and Utah, and FIRE is participating on that front, too.

To understand how courts decide these challenges, it helps to understand that courts don’t treat every age-assurance law the same way. The constitutional analysis depends on what access the law conditions.

The basic rule is: Courts have set a very high constitutional bar when the government requires people to identify themselves before accessing lawful speech online.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that access to the internet — including social media — is protected by the First Amendment. It has also overturned attempts to create entirely new categories of speech with no or less constitutional protection simply because lawmakers believe they’re harmful to minors.

If laws seek to age-gate the internet, websites, social media, or general-purpose AI tools, can the government force us to identify ourselves before participating in some of the basic ways we communicate, learn, and explore ideas online?

No. Except in limited circumstances, age-assurance laws that condition access to protected speech generally violate the First Amendment. Courts have therefore blocked many of these laws. Others remain tied up in ongoing appeals.

Why are lawmakers focusing on AI chatbots?

As Americans continue to use AI tools to ask questions, research unfamiliar topics, draft emails, write code, learn new skills, and think through difficult problems, some lawmakers are increasingly asking whether access to it should depend on a user’s age.

Supporters of age-verification requirements argue that AI chatbots can expose children to inappropriate conversations, harmful advice, or emotionally manipulative interactions. They believe companies should be required to find out when they’re interacting with minors so they can restrict certain features or content.

As FIRE has previously explained, the government has an interest in protecting children from harm. At the same time, parents — not the government — should decide how and when their children engage online. Unchecked government authority to decide what information children may access would displace parental judgment and create opportunities for officials to shape the information environment according to their own priorities.

The same problems arise with government restrictions on AI tools. Government-imposed requirements for minors to identify themselves before asking questions of an AI system violates something that has traditionally been private: the freedom to explore ideas, satisfy curiosity, and think through difficult questions before sharing them with anyone else.

These burdens don’t stop with minors. Once companies must distinguish minors from adults, everyone is forced into the same age-assurance system.

These requirements also influence how AI systems are designed, what features they include, and whether proving who you are online emerges as the default rather than the exception.

That is one reason anonymity has long been protected. It safeguards far more than wrongdoing. It allows whistleblowers to think through difficult decisions, victims of domestic abuse to seek help safely, political dissidents to explore controversial ideas, and ordinary people to explore personal topics — all without revealing their identities.

Should you have to prove who you are to talk to AI?

Asking an AI a question to research a medical condition or learn about politics all involves protected speech. Showing your face or an ID before you engage in those activities burdens something fundamental: your ability to seek knowledge before revealing who you are. That’s quite different from showing your ID to buy a beer — a physical product. Speech isn’t alcohol!

As FIRE has argued before, the global proliferation of age verification rules is moving us toward a “papers, please” internet, where online spaces for expression are open only to those willing to identify themselves. Many people will think twice before searching for sensitive information, asking difficult questions, or expressing unpopular views.

Whatever its intended benefits, it will make the internet much less free for everyone.

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

Free speech is in a curious place today. We’re facing challenges that, in many ways, feel fresh and new while at the same time fighting battles that feel ancient. Take two of the issues we discuss in this week’s Free Speech Dispatch: age-gating and blasphemy. While restrictions on young people’s speech is nothing new, what is new — and remarkable — is that governments in different countries now seem to be pursuing the same aggressive approach to tech regulation. On the other hand, even today the right to commit “blasphemy” is far from settled. People can still be put to death for it. Restrictions on insults to the gods may be as old as humanity itself.

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EU bans loom as Australia hardens its own

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on teen social media bans. The bans are everywhere, and more are coming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that the EU will seek some form of a youth social media ban across Europe.

“It is clear we need age-appropriate restrictions to platforms,” von der Leyen said. Though she did not offer exact details on what restrictions would apply to which ages, she advocated “a phased and gradual access for different age ranges.” An expert panel convened by von der Leyen pushed for policies across the EU that restrict “social media plus” — including platforms with video games and chatbots — for children under 13, but added that member states could consider applying the rules to older ages too. Irish officials, for example, have signaled their intent to move forward with an under-16 ban.

Check back for more details this autumn, when the European Commission plans to roll out its draft policy.

Over in Australia, the landmark under-16 ban has been missing the mark. It simply has not worked to keep kids off of social media. So officials are doubling down. Parliament will now consider legislation that would double the maximum fine for platforms that don’t take enough steps to keep kids offline, bringing the fine up to nearly 70 million USD.

We’ve also discussed at length the problems with the UK’s incoming under-16 ban — we know too little about how it will operate, but we do know that officials have threatened it will be more expansive and extreme than Australia’s rules. With Keir Starmer’s exit as British prime minister, Labour Member of Parliament Andy Burnham is on track to fill the role. And Burnham has confirmed that the change in leadership will not signal a change in policy.

“He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families,” a spokesperson said. “The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.”

New ‘trusted’ media policy and more from the UK

There, as always, is more free speech news out of the UK. Last month, government officials unveiled a new “trusted” media strategy to combat disinformation. Measures under discussion include requirements that social media and video sharing platforms “make sure that news content from public service media . . . and other trustworthy providers, is prominent and easy to find on their platforms.” Platforms may be required to augment their algorithms to ensure government-approved sources are “more likely to be at the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news.”

Meanwhile, Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice is pushing an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, introduced into Parliament earlier this year. The amendment would require that all election materials be in either English or Welsh — with a penalty of fines or up to six months in prison for violations.

And the UK’s track record with censorial defamation threats continues: JK Rowling, author and founder of sexual violence support center Beira’s Place, is offering to fund legal action over an Amnesty International UK report — “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK” — that accused Beira’s Place, For Women Scotland, the LGB Alliance, and similar groups of being “anti-rights.”

Amnesty quickly took down the report, saying its “use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed.” Rowling has not dropped the matter — her organization Beria’s place is still threatening legal action, and Rowling is encouraging others listed in the report to apply to her fund to target Amnesty UK with lawsuits over its criticism.

Hong Kong police targets booksellers

If Hong Kong authorities are to be believed, the city is in the midst of a dangerous crime wave — from bookshops. Independent bookshops and their employees have been the target of police raids, tax investigations, and arrests. This week, police raided two more shops, Have a Nice Stay and Greenfield Bookstore, and arrested five employees on sedition charges. The Hong Kong Free Press reports that police “found that the five had displayed and sold items carrying seditious intent” that “could stir hatred for the Hong Kong government, the Judiciary and law enforcement bodies.”

After the raid, Secretary for Security Chris Tang said he would not create a “banned books” list, as that would “let criminals off the hook.” He added that booksellers have a “responsibility” to ensure their material “won’t endanger national security,” just as restaurants have a duty not to sell poison.

Author CJ Hopkins faces prosecution, again

Readers may remember FIRE covering the case of CJ Hopkins, an American writer living in Germany, who faced prosecution for violating Germany’s law against disseminating propaganda. The charges centered on two tweets Hopkins posted that showed a swastika and medical mask on the cover art for his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

Hopkins was initially acquitted, but the prosecutor appealed the verdict and he’ll be sentenced later this year. Last November, Hopkins received yet another visit from police, who interrogated him and seized his devices. But Hopkins says that, while he waits to be sentenced in the case over the cover art for his book, he is now facing separate charges for the “authoring, publishing, and advertising” of the very same book. Hopkins says he had even cancelled the distribution of his book after his previous prosecution, but is nevertheless facing new charges.

A blasphemy accusation can be a death sentence

Seven nations still keep the death penalty for blasphemy on the books, though outside of Iran actual government-run executions are rare. Mob executions, however, are a different story and simply being accused of blasphemy in Nigeria or Pakistan can result in vigilante violence. This month, an armed mob of men and even children surrounded a courthouse where a blasphemy suspect was being held and demanded they be allowed to execute the accused.

And in Pakistan, Amir Peter, a 61-year-old man awaiting trial for blasphemy, died after suffering deteriorating health in custody. A shopkeeper accused him of insulting the prophet Muhammad and Peter was held until his death, even though he suffered from advanced dementia. An investigation this month found that in Punjab, the province in which Peter was arrested, most of the blasphemy cases registered over the past five years were found to be totally fabricated by accusers who use the law to settle personal fights and disputes.

In less lethal, but still disturbing, news, Turkish authorities detained comedian Deniz Goktas upon when he landed in Istanbul and questioned him for “publicly insulting religious values.” Goktas’ recent set in Istanbul earned millions of views on YouTube — and apparently dozens of complaints from viewers for his jokes about religion.

EU court affirms Russian propaganda sanctions

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled this month that EU sanctions against broadcasting or transmitting Russian state propaganda from RT or Sputnik extend to websites that are free to access and operate without a profit motive. The case centered on a German state’s 2023 prosecution and seizure of the Traugott Ickeroth blog. That year, the blog reposted three videos from RT. Reason reports that it’s a site run by reader donations where one of the bloggers “uses the ‘Traugott Ickerroth’ pseudonym to publish tracts about interdimensional aliens and the Illuminati.” The Court confirmed that German prosecutors should pursue action even against non-commercial entities that broadcast sanctioned content.

Even Spongebob can’t evade Russia’s LGBT ban

A highly memed clip of Spongebob Squarepants casting a rainbow over his head looks a little different to Russian viewers. Instead, there’s just a yellow arc over his head. A likely reason? The station may very well be trying to avoid Russia’s oppressive LGBT propaganda laws, which dole out harsh penalties for symbols and material — rainbows included — deemed to be advancing sexual themes or identities banned by the state.

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